Archive for the ‘Cultural issues’ Category
A review of a new bio-pic on the life of American war photographer Lee Miller
September 15th, 2024 by Roger Darlington
For British actress Kate Winslet, it has been a nine-year passion project to bring to the big screen the story of American war photographer Lee Miller (1907-1977). It was a remarkable life: after working as a fashion model in New York and a fashion photographer in Paris, during World War II she served as war […]
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A review of the classic 1949 film “The Third Man”
September 10th, 2024 by Roger Darlington
We tend to think of film noir as primarily a genre emanating from America and typically set in Los Angeles, but this classic of the genre is a British production shot on location in post-war Vienna. Written for the screen by Graham Greene and directed by Carol Reed, the cast is a mixture of American (Joseph Cotton […]
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A review of the classic novel “Goodbye To Berlin” by Christopher Isherwood
September 6th, 2024 by Roger Darlington
This 1939 novel by Anglo-American writer Isherwood has long been a classic and was the inspiration for the musical and the film “Cabaret”. In many respects, it is an unusual novel. It is substantially autobiographical, based on the author’s time in the German capital during the dying days of the Weimar Republic in 1929-1931. The […]
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A review of “The Great Gatsby” by F Scott Fitzgerald
August 25th, 2024 by Roger Darlington
By the time that I read this work published in 1925, it had long been a candidate for ‘the Great American Novel’ and had been filmed no less than four times (I’ve seen the 1974 and 2013 versions). Ostensibly, it is an American Jazz Era story of the obsessive love exhibited by the enigmatic, new-rich […]
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A review of the new superhero movie “Deadpool & Wolverine”
August 4th, 2024 by Roger Darlington
The idea of a multiverse has dominated superhero movies of late and, in storytelling terms, it does allow for considerable flexibility and fun. In this film, the home universe – ours, if you accept that it’s full of Avengers, X-Men and the like – is Earth-10005. Apparently, the multiverse and The Sacred Timeline (you’ve never […]
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A review of the new movie “Hit Man”
July 27th, 2024 by Roger Darlington
A star is born and his name is Glen Powell. After a series of small parts in both television and film, he had a break-out appearance in “Top Gun: Maverick” but, in Hit Man”, he takes the eponymous role, where he is rarely off the screen and has to adopt a variety of personas, and […]
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A review of “How To Read Literature Like A Professor” by Thomas C Foster (2014)
July 21st, 2024 by Roger Darlington
This book was recommended to me by my Canadian theatre buddy who teaches English literature in a high school in the United States. It was originally published in 2003 and became a classic guide, before it was thoroughly revised and updated for a new edition in 2014. It is written by an American (Foster was […]
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A review of the new blockbuster movie “Twisters”
July 20th, 2024 by Roger Darlington
As “Alien” (1979) begat “Aliens” (1986), so “Twister” (1996) has now led to “Twisters” (2024), although with a much longer interval of almost three decades, meaning that the only common personage is Steven Spielberg in the executive producer role. So we’re back storm-chasing in the ‘Tornado Alley’ of Oklahoma, this time with some more advanced […]
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A review of the new animated movie “Inside Out 2”
June 29th, 2024 by Roger Darlington
The original “Inside Out” was so good and so successful and it concluded with the discovery of a button labelled puberty, so I was sure that a sequel would soon follow. In fact, surprisingly it’s taken nine years for Pixar – with a new director Kelsey Mann – to provide us with the sequel, although […]
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A review of the heavy science-fiction novel “Death’s End” by Cixin Liu
June 25th, 2024 by Roger Darlington
Following “The Three-Body Problem” and “The Dark Forest”, this is the third and final novel in the ‘Remembrance of Earth’s Past’ trilogy by the noted Chinese science fiction writer. It was first published in Chinese in 2010 and then in English in 2016. It was a finalist for the 2017 Hugo Award for Best Novel […]
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