Archive for the ‘Cultural issues’ Category
A review of the new award-winning film “Hamnet”
January 18th, 2026 by Roger Darlington
We know so little about the life of the greatest English writer William Shakespeare, but that does not stop us wanting invented stories about him including earlier films “Shakespeare In Love” (1998) and “All Is True” (2018). What we do know is that Shakespeare had a son called Hamnet who died aged 11 in 1596, […]
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A review pf the new blockbuster movie “Avatar: Fire And Ash”
January 9th, 2026 by Roger Darlington
Any film directed by James Cameron is a must-see and any film in his “Avatar” franchise is a veritable spectacular. We had to wait 13 years for the first sequel but only another three years for this third adventure. As with all the “Avatar” movies, I choose to see this in IMAX and 3D on […]
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A review of the 2021 film “Operation Mincemeat”
January 8th, 2026 by Roger Darlington
This is the unlikely – and, for a long time, totally secret – story of a World War Two subterfuge that persuaded Hitler to believe that, in 1943, the Allies were going to make the first invasion of Europe in Greece instead of Sicily. The film stays close to the true details of the operation, […]
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A review of the popular movie “Crocodile Dundee”
January 8th, 2026 by Roger Darlington
There is a genre of film known as ‘fish out of water’ where the protagonist finds himself or herself in totally unfamiliar surrounding, usually causing much humour and sometimes some fear. This trope is featured twice in this delightful romantic comedy of 1986: first when New York journalist Sue Charlton (Linda Kozlowski) ventures into the […]
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A review of the 1988 film “Die Hard”
January 7th, 2026 by Roger Darlington
This action movie may not be a classic work in the sense of great cinema or of winner of awards, but it has become a commercial and cultural phenomenon. It was immediately a huge box office success, it led to no less than four sequels, and the franchise earned a worldwide total of $1.4 billion. […]
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A review of the award-winning film “Marty Supreme”
January 7th, 2026 by Roger Darlington
This is a rather odd story, but it is told with considerable panache at a frenetic pace with an eclectic score. Set in the early 1950s, it centres on the efforts of young, working-class New Yorker Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet) to become the world table tennis champion which will require him to beat Koto Endo, […]
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A review of the classic film “The Piano” (1993)
January 7th, 2026 by Roger Darlington
An original story told in captivating fashion, this film is a triumph for New Zealander Jane Campion who both wrote and directed it. The setting is a poor community in a coastal region of 1850s New Zealand. Ada (Holly Hunter), a Scottish widow who hasn’t spoken since childhood, arrives as a kind of mail order […]
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A review of the 1965 classic film “Doctor Zhivago”
December 28th, 2025 by Roger Darlington
So many of the brilliantly-talented team that created outstanding “Lawrence Of Arabia”, just three years later crafted the magnificent “Doctor “Zhivago”: director David Lean, scriptwriter Robert Bolt, composer Maurice Jarre, cinematographer Freddie Young and actors Omar Sharif and Alec Guinness. Based on the huge, sprawling 1957 novel by the Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Boris Pasternak, […]
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A review of the 1968 film “Where Eagles Dare”
December 28th, 2025 by Roger Darlington
This wartime adventure is something of an oddity. The strangeness starts with the writing of the screenplay in just six weeks by the novelist Alistair MacLean who went on to turn the script into a novel. Then there is the plot which contains more twists that a corkscrew and is so convoluted that one leading […]
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A review of the novel “Klara And The Sun” by Kazuo Ishiguro
December 15th, 2025 by Roger Darlington
Ishiguro is a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature but has only written eight novels. This is his latest – published in 2021 – and the third that I have read (after “The Remains Of The Day” and “Never Let Me Go”). Like all his work, the writing is deceptively simple but the messaging […]
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