A summer of joy tinged by fear of end
Colm Bairéad’s lyrical Gaelic-language film The Quiet Girl unearths great emotional complexity from a relatively simple premise.
A human lifespan is nothing in the eyes of a volcano
Rarely has the numinous in the natural world been so profoundly expressed. Fire of Love’s images of slow-roiling lava lakes, of rainfalls of hot rocks, of driving torrents of scalding ash are both terrifying and awe-inspiring.
On its face, ridiculous … but never entirely so
Bruno (Damon Herriman) stands befuddled before a supermarket shelf stacked with innumerable varieties of tinned beans.
Aesthetics hold a film that doesn’t match up to the novel
The stand-out stars of Where the Crawdads Sing are the landscape and the cinematography.
Complex, ambitious, exploited, and ultimately tragic
Before setting foot in a cinema many were prepared to dismiss Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis as an exercise in style over substance.
A good man, bad choices, and a crumbling world
The opening scene of A Hero follows Rahim (Amir Jadidi) as he leaves prison and heads to the Tomb of Xerxes where his brother-in-law is working.
An insight into an American iconoclast 40 years in the making
Kurt Vonnegut had a special relationship with time. The late American author was often maligned between the high-water marks of his success.
A world where the fate of men lies on a missing eyelash
The premise of Operation Mincemeat seems ludicrous. Hoping to make Hitler believe the Allies are about to launch a major offensive in Greece rather than Sicily, a dead body containing misleading plans is off-loaded from a submarine and left to wash ashore in Spain.
Euthanasia story sidesteps ethical posturing for human experience
Medically assisted suicide is an issue that seems indelibly fraught. It’s an individual’s right to bodily autonomy, versus the sanctity of life.
More to The Duke than an entertaining caper
The Duke is not quite the quirky British comedy its trailer suggests.
