Archive for the ‘Cultural issues’ Category
A review of the new film “One Battle After Another”
September 27th, 2025 by Roger Darlington
A film by Paul Thomas Anderson is never boring and once again he has written, produced and directed a work that is fresh and original, weird but wonderful. It’s four years since we tasted his “Licorice Pizza” but the wait was worth it. None of the characters are credible, instead they are essentially caricatures, and […]
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A review of the new film “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey”
September 21st, 2025 by Roger Darlington
This romantic fantasy is worth seeing for the cast. Good-looking, talented and eminently watchable Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie play David and Sarah, strangers who meet at a mutual friend’s wedding and there are cameos from Kevin Kline and Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Unfortunately, aside from the cast, there is too little to commend this work from […]
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A review of the novel “You Are Here” by David Nicholls
September 18th, 2025 by Roger Darlington
The author of the outstandingly successful “One Day” has done it again, crafting an immensely readable and thoroughly enjoyable romantic novel. In the case of “One Day”, the stylistic device was a series of chapters set exactly one year after another. This time, the device is alternating chapters – each very short – from the […]
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A review of the new rom-com with an edge “Materialists”
August 17th, 2025 by Roger Darlington
“Past Lives” (2023) was written and directed by Korean-Canadian Celine Song as a wonderfully-assured debut feature film. I loved it and have now seen it three times. In her second work, Song is again writer and director and, for me, it is another delight. The structure of the two movies is essentially the same: a […]
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A review of the latest “Superman” blockbuster movie
August 11th, 2025 by Roger Darlington
If since the 1980s, three actors can portray Spider-Man and no less than six can play Batman, then I guess we can have four representations of Superman: Christopher Reeve (1978-1987), Brandon Routh (2006), Henry Cavill (2013-2021) and now David Corenswet. More significantly, we have a new writer and director James Gunn, who did such a […]
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“Late Shift”: a foreign film with a universal message
August 5th, 2025 by Roger Darlington
This is an unusual film, wonderfully made and with a powerful narrative. It is Swiss and located in German-speaking Zurich. In fact, virtually the entire film is set in one building, a local hospital, and over just one night, the titular shift. We follow the work of one dedicated nurse Floria (played magnificently by Leonie […]
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A review of the novel “Intermezzo” by Sally Rooney
July 24th, 2025 by Roger Darlington
I’m a fan of Rooney’s work and have read all of her novels. This is her fourth, longest, and most ambitious. As always, the setting is contemporary Ireland. Unusually, however,the leading characters are both men: brothers Peter (32, a successful lawyer) and Ivan (22, an aspiring chess champion). The novel explores the relationship between the […]
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A review of the classic film “Barry Lyndon” (1975)
July 19th, 2025 by Roger Darlington
There is a sense in which any Stanley Kubrick film could be a candidate for classic and it is a mark of his genius that each of his films represents a different genre. Here we have a period drama, based on William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel of 1844, where Kubrick is writer, producer and director. It […]
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A review of the 1928 classic film “The Passion Of Joan Of Arc”
July 13th, 2025 by Roger Darlington
This story of the most French of characters, the defender and patron saint of the nation – Joan had been canonised just eight years earlier – was in fact directed by a Dane, Carl Theodor Dreyer, as a black & white production with no sound. Indeed the French had problems with it: the Archbishop of […]
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A review of the new blockbuster movie “Jurassic World Rebirth”
July 6th, 2025 by Roger Darlington
After a trio of “Jurassic Park” movies (1993, 1997, 2001) and a trio of “Jurassic World” films (2015, 2018, 2022), I’m not sure that we really needed a seventh episode in the franchise, but it seems that dinosaurs are ever-popular and ever-profitable and this latest adventure has a few things going for it. The special […]
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