It is at times like these that we need films to lighten the soul and take us out of our own introspective and selfish preoccupations. Continuing with my Curzon on-line theme, we discover a Kore-eda film we have not seen. I Wish remains one of my favourite 5-star movies ever and I was also thrilled by Like […]

Don’t despair! Even though we are confined and unable to go to the movies you can subscribe to Curzon Home Cinema and see all the new releases at a fraction of the price you would pay at the Everyman. In addition there are 12 classic films which are free, and others in their library which […]

After all the hype I was disappointed by The Good Liar. Notwithstanding, Hellen Mirren and Ian McKellen are a couple of pitch-perfect pros who lead us their respective merry dances through the story-line with grace, gusto and laughs.

Betty McLeish (Mirren) is a middle-class wealthy widow who is looking for companionship to combat her loneliness. She meets […]

What a week for five-star movies, this following hot on the heels of  I’m sorry I missed you! I only realised after I had bought the tickets that The Irishman  is three and a half hours long and began to wonder how Scorsese could sustain our interest for so long. I need not have worried.

The Irishman is the confession […]

We had to steel ourselves to see this. Ken Loach’s last film, I Daniel Blake, shares the same scriptwriter, Paul Laverty, and left me glum for days. Both deal with life at the rough end of Britain, where people don’t have mortgages, are either unemployed or work zero hours contracts in our gig economy and struggle to […]

Quick fess up: I know nothing much about Judy Garland apart from her childhood star status, that she was Liza Minnelli’s’ mum and she was addicted to drink and drugs. So this a written from a more ingenue point of view than most reviews you will read. 

This is a timely film in the era of […]

This is Joanna Hogg’s fourth film and cements her reputation as a documenter of British class and its tangled relationships; her last-but-one outing was Archipelago  where a family holiday in the Isles of Scilly reveals deep rifts within it. See it if you can! It stars my neighbour Tom Hiddleston apart from anything else.

photograph by Agatha A. […]

Lulu Wang’s film is extraordinary on many levels. Too Asian to get US funding; not American enough with no American characters to get Chinese funding (Crazy Rich Asians bombed in China). Wang had difficulty getting funding until Christopher Weisz came along. But she stuck to her guns in this autobiographical cross-cultural story about a Chinese American […]

Love him or hate him: Tarantino is marmite. On the whole I love him; the violence is so stylised I can’t take it seriously: I particularly admire Pulp Fiction (obviously!)  Django Unchained and  Inglorious Basterds.

ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD
Brad Pitt (L) and Leonardo DiCaprio
credit: Andrew Cooper/Sony Pictures

The trailer for this movie made my mouth water in anticipation […]

If you loved Ritesh Batra’s  Lunch Box you should seek this film out, despite the lukewarm reviews. Both revolve around unlikely romances: in the utterly charming  Lunchbox it’s between the tiffin (lunchbox) man and an unhappy housewife, and here in  Photograph between a low-caste Muslim photographer and a middle-class Hindu student.

Rafi (Nawazuddin Siddiqui, also in  Lunchbox) plies his trade at […]