Archive for the ‘Cultural issues’ Category
A review of the Academy Award-winning film “Parasite”
February 10th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
I saw this South Korean work just hours before it won four Academy Awards making it the first non-English language film to win Best Picture in the 92 years of the Oscars. Impressive though “Parasite” is, I’m not sure that it’s quite that good. I would probably have made different choices for Best Picture (“Joker”), Best Director […]
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A review of “The Secret Commonwealth” by Philip Pullman
February 5th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
This is the second part of the trilogy “The Book Of Dust”, following the original trilogy of “His Dark Materials”. This novel is a sequel to the first three, set some 10 years after them and therefore some 20 years after “La Belle Sauvage” which was the first part of “The Book Of Dust”. The […]
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A review of the latest Clint Eastwood film “Richard Jewell”
February 4th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
I’m not sure how well this film will do outside the United States since the titular name will be unfamiliar to non-Americans. Jewell was a security guard at a concert celebrating the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta when he spotted a suspicious backpack and managed to have most of the nearby spectators cleared from the […]
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A review of the important new film “Bombshell”
January 19th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
The #MeToo movement has been a much-needed and long-overdue exposition of the scale and severity of sexual harassment especially in the workplace. This important film sets out how one powerful man – Roger Ailes, the founder of the hugely successful Fox News television network – was eventually brought down for his appalling behaviour (although his […]
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Feeling cold? Try “Frozen”.
January 15th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
“Frozen” “Frozen” will always have a special place in my heart because it was the first film seen by my granddaughter Catrin (one month short of her third birthday). We saw it with her little friend James (just three months older) who was also making his first visit to the cinema. Both sat through all […]
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A review of the Sam Mendes film “1917”
January 12th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
Director Sam Mendes stunned cinema-goers with his opening sequence for the James Bond movie “Spectre”, set during The Day of the Dead parade in Mexico City, when it appeared to be shot in one take of seven minutes (actually done in three shots). In retrospect, we can see that this was just a trial run […]
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A review of the latest film version of “Little Women”
January 7th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
“Little Women” has now been made into a feature film as often as the number of daughters in the much-loved novel by Louisa May Alcott: by George Cukor in 1933, by Mervyn Le Roy in 1949, by Gillian Armstrong in 1994, and now by Greta Gerwig who wrote as well as directed. Gerwig has assembled […]
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A review of “The Irishman” – destined to be a classic movie
December 31st, 2019 by Roger Darlington
Netflix, which funded this movie, has given us a classic. Most viewers will stream it at home and probably watch it over a couple of evenings, but I made a point of catching it at the cinema when of course I saw it one sitting (it runs to an incredible three and a half hours […]
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A review of “Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise Of Skywalker”
December 30th, 2019 by Roger Darlington
Over 40 years after the “Star Wars” cinematic saga began, we have the ninth – and presumably last – episode in the three trilogies originally envisaged by George Lucas and I’ve enjoyed seeing each movie immediately it appeared on the big screen. The honour of closing the franchise goes to director and co-writer J J […]
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A review of the novel “Prague Spring” by Simon Mawer
December 22nd, 2019 by Roger Darlington
In some ways, Mawer is an unlikely fiction writer. He took a degree in Zoology at Oxford University and has worked as a biology teacher in Rome for most of his life and he only published his first novel at the comparatively late age of 41. I discovered him through his eighth novel, the wonderful […]
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