Archive for the ‘Cultural issues’ Category
A review of the recent French film “Who You Think I Am”
August 15th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
Juliette Binoche is a talented and beautiful actress who has now appeared in over 60 French-language and English-language films. I really admire her work and must have seen over a dozen of her roles. In this French-language work from 2019, she plays Claire, a 50 year old professor of French literature, who uses Facebook to […]
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Because it’s the weekend: k d lang sings “Hallelujah”
August 12th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
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A review of “The Good Shepherd (currently showing on Netflix)
August 10th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
This 2006 movie is something of a cinematic curiosity since it has so much talent on both sides of the camera and yet the outcome is so disappointing. It purports to tell the story of the formation by the United States of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during the Second World War and its […]
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A review of the new action movie “Bullet Train”
August 9th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
I once took a bullet train from Tokyo to Kyoto but it was nothing like this crazy movie which looks like something that British director Guy Ritchie and American director Quentin Tarantino might have made if ever they teamed up for a joint production. In fact, the director is David Leitch whose last work was […]
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Word of the day: exeat
August 5th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
This word actually came up in a conversation over coffee that I had this week. It was totally new to me. Exeat means official permission for a student to be absent from a college or university. It is the third person singular present subjunctive of the Latin verb expire which means to go out. So […]
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A review of the new film “Thirteen Lives”
August 4th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
In June 2018 in northern Thailand, the young boys of the Wild Boars junior football team aged 11-16 and their coach went missing in the local caves of Tham Luang. We all remember how -18 days later – they were eventually saved, but the story still seems almost literally incredible. In this film version of […]
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A review of the novel “Beautiful World, Where Are You” by Sally Rooney
August 3rd, 2022 by Roger Darlington
I really enjoyed Rooney’s first two novels “Conversations With Friends” and “Normal People”, both of which have now been turned into a 12-episode television series, so I was keen to read this third work and it does not disappoint. As with her earlier works, the focus is on friendships and relationships between young people in […]
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A review of the new movie “Thor: Love And Thunder”
July 31st, 2022 by Roger Darlington
As a fan of superhero movies, I’ve religiously seen every contribution to the Marvel Cinematic Universe as it was released which is how I found myself at the 27th MCU offering – the fourth devoted to the Norse god and the second directed by New Zealander Taika Waititi. It has an impressive cast: Chris Hemsworth […]
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A review of the new film “Where The Crawdads Sing”
July 30th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
The word crawdad is a regional term for crayfish. Of course, they cannot sing, but the strange title of this film is an expression meaning an isolated or safe place. The central character of the story, Kya Clark, needs such a space, initially because of child abuse and then because of community hostility (locals call […]
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A review of the new Netflix movie “The Gray Man”
July 23rd, 2022 by Roger Darlington
This is a film adaptation of a best-selling novel of the same name by Mark Greaney and, since the book is the opening salvo of a (so far) 11-work series, we could well be seeing the start of a new spy film franchise to rival James Bond or Ethan Hunt or Jason Bourne. The CIA […]
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