The English Patient received twelve nominations at the 69th Academy Awards, and came away with nine golden gongs, including the illustrious prizes for Best Director, Best Supporting Actress, and Best Picture. But twenty years later is this epic romance – framed in the shell of a monastery in the dying days of the Italian Campaign of World War II – still…
Is The Conjuring an apt title for this fairly prosaic but competently made supernatural horror? Who or what precisely is conjured? The demon Bathsheba – the name of the woman who in the Hebrew Bible was summoned by King David owing to her good looks, beginning a sordid tale of adultery and the early death by way of punishment of…
Should any woman feel obliged to learn how to twirl spaghetti into a spoon, just so she might impress the family of the man who she is steadily falling in love with? This question lies at the heart of Brooklyn, which tells of the immigration of a young Irish lass at the beginning of the 1950s, a blossoming romance with…
If you think that Quentin Tarantino’s films are nothing but gratuitous violence, undignified tales full of sound and fury more often than not told out of sync, then just look at ‘The Gold Watch’ story strand from Pulp Fiction. In a scene that comes midway through the movie but precedes every other from a chronological standpoint, a young Butch Coolidge…
Whether he was scuttling about the village or seaside, or gently satirising modern architecture and the impersonal clunk of automated machines, Jacques Tati always took circuitous routes but more often than not ended up right in the heart of his viewers. His films provided the inspiration for such worrying works as David Lynch’s Eraserhead and Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York,…
These days when someone suggests a night in with a movie trilogy, it feels like they’ve made you an offer you can’t refuse. We’re all well versed now when it comes to bingeing on series, content with sustaining our interest over drawn out periods and across lingering parts. But The Godfather by Francis Ford Coppola began the first American film with a…
Everyone learns their lesson the hard way in Million Dollar Baby. Given that his former charge Eddie ‘Scrap-Iron’ Dupris (Morgan Freeman) was blinded in one eye in his 109th and final fight, Frankie Dunn (Clint Eastwood) is understandably reluctant to lead another boxer to a title shot. When ‘Big’ Willie Little (Mike Colter) tires of waiting and leaves Frankie for…
