Archive for the ‘Consumer matters’ Category
A review of the new superhero movie “Thunderbolts*”
May 4th, 2025 by Roger Darlington
The hugely successful (over $30 billion in revenues) and massively prolonged (17 years and 36 films) Marvel Cinematic Universe has been looking rather lame of late, but this movie has brought some freshness to the franchise. With the Avengers officially history, a new team was required to save the world if not the universe and […]
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A review of the new film “May December”
November 19th, 2023 by Roger Darlington
At the heart of this ambitious and ambiguous movie from director Todd Haynes are two enigmatic and ultimately unsympathetic female characters. There is Gracie Atherton-Yoo (a wonderful Julianne Moore), who 24 years earlier went to prison for having sex with a teenage boy whom she later married, and Elizabeth Berry (an outstanding Natalie Portman), an […]
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A review of the 2019 film “Le Mans ’66”
June 7th, 2023 by Roger Darlington
I’m no petrolhead. I don’t own a car and I don’t even drive. But this car-racing movie is a cracker. That’s because it’s a well-written, character-driven film pitting corporate bureaucracy against individual flair. The corporation is the American Ford motor company which decides in the mid 1960s that it wants to make its image more […]
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A review of the classic film “The Battleship Potemkin” (1925)
July 17th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
This black white silent film directed by the legendary Sergei Eisenstein narrates the mutiny on the titular vessel in 1905 which can be seen as a forerunner of the two revolutions of 1917. Except for the leader of the mutiny, all the roles were filled by ‘people off the streets’ and, in the Odessa steps […]
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Word of the day: flâneur
May 3rd, 2021 by Roger Darlington
A friend used this term today to describe me. I’d never heard of it and had to look it up. Flâneur is a French term meaning ‘stroller’ used by nineteenth-century French poet Charles Baudelaire to identify an observer of modern urban life. I guess this captures the essence of my Facebook page, especially since I moved to central […]
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A review of the 2010 film “Letters To Juliet”
January 6th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
I once made a day trip to Verona in Italy and visited the courtyard where there is a balcony and statue of Juliet as an evocation of the play by Shakespeare. At the time, I didn’t realise that people left letters to Juliet pressed into the walls and that a volunteer group answered any of […]
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A review of the recent independent film “Monsoon”
December 5th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
The story in this film – a search for a sense of cultural identity – is loosely inspired by the experience of writer and director Hong Khaou whose family was forced to flee Cambodia so that he was brought up in Britain. Kit – played by Henry Golding in a more mature role than in […]
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A review of the new blockbuster movie “Tenet”
August 29th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
“Tenet” is Christopher Nolan’s 11th film and I have viewed and admired all his previous work except his very first film which I’ve never seen. Of the movies that – like “Tenet” – Nolan wrote as well as directed, I was immensely impressed with “Memento” and “Inception” but struggled with the second half of “Interstellar”. […]
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A review of the novel “The Man In The High Castle” by Philip K Dick
August 26th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
I decided to read this 1962 novel after the success of the Amazon television series of the same name broadcast in 40 parts between 2015-2019 even though I never viewed the series. It was immediately apparent to me that Dick’s books are generally better on the screen that on the page – think of “Total […]
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A review of the 2017 film “Wonder”
April 28th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
American schoolboy August ‘Auggie’ Pullman (Jacob Tremblay) is well-supported by his mother (Julia Roberts) – who calls him a “wonder” – and father (Owen Wilson) and he needs all the support he can find since he was born with a serious facial deformity called Mandibulofacial Dysostosis or Treacher Collins Syndrome Based on a novel by […]
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