The sumptuous Carême hits two basic needs for a high-end television series. One is for sex, but the other is rarer in fictional television: food porn. This combination is an absolutely wonderful idea, because god knows our appetite for something good to eat doesn’t always get its due from a …
Australian auteur Justin Kurzel adapts Richard Flanagan’s novel to harrowing effect in The Narrow Road to the Deep North. The adaptation blends a harrowing tale of a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp with a war-bound love story and a modern tale of surviving the trauma. The series doesn’t wait to set up …
Rebecca Lenkiewicz will always be in the British history books as the first living female writer to have a play produced by The National Theatre. Her Naked Skin, staged in 2008, was about the violence involved as British women fought for the right to vote; my main memory is of …
I consider James Hawes’ feature directorial debut, One Life, one of the most memorable films of its release year. Based on the director alone, expectations for his sophomore effort were already high. Add to that The Amateur being a spy thriller starring Rami Malek – whose career-best performance remains his …
In his essay Defense of an Adaptation, French film critic and co-founder of the historical film magazine Cahiers du Cinema André Bazin states that a literary adaptation for the cinema is impure. He points out how dependence on another medium affects filmmaking and how leaning over another source material, either …
Director José Avelino Gilles Corbett Lourenço’s I’ve Never Wanted Anyone More is the latest entry into a very, very long tradition – 250 years and counting, in fact. The film is a loose modernised adaptation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1774 episolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (indeed the …
Pierce Brosnan became an action icon when he portrayed the most iconic secret agent, James Bond. Throughout his four films with the franchise, he appeared in some of the most popular films of the recent era, including Goldeneye. Lately, Brosnan has engaged in action flicks as an experienced agent who …
Nickel Boys, an adaptation of a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Colson Whitehead, has attempted to meet the current moment by telling a story of horrendous racism and child abuse with neither racism nor violence in it. This is worse than the biographies of Harriet Tubman and Martin Luther King, Jr. …
In 2019, author Holly Jackson released the YA fiction novel A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder to critical acclaim. It went on to win 2020’s British Book Awards Children’s Fiction Book Winner of the Year and, as with most award-winning novels, it was soon picked up for a television adaption. …
It’s all too easy to get swept up in the exaggerated hype surrounding a highly anticipated blockbuster, especially these days when initial reactions to such films often take on a clickbait tone and are packed with buzzwords studios love to plaster on posters, trailers, and more. Directed by Jon M. …
Based on the bestselling book by Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing rockets viewers back to 1972 Belfast with an explosive opening scene. The miniseries employs different framing devices to Keefe’s nonfiction tome, but both work to great effect. Widowed mother of ten Jean McConville (Judith Roddy) sends her eldest daughter …
From the moment the programme for the London Film Festival was announced, Nickel Boys quickly became one of my most anticipated films of the entire festival. Not only did the film receive positive reviews after its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival at the end of August, but its …
German-born director Nora Fingscheidt is in high-demand with her new film The Outrun starring Oscar-nominee Saoirse Ronan. I was lucky enough to speak with her about her new film, where we talk about the film’s themes on addiction and redemption, the power of Ronan, and stealing from the best films. …
It’s depressing to realize someone is coasting on their reputation instead of using their talent, and in fact making so little use of their talent that their reputation becomes suspect. This is the sorry state of affairs after seeing The Room Next Door, written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar, that …
What you have to realize about Queer is that it is an adaptation of a book by William S. Burroughs, so the queerness on display here is less about sexuality, but more a way of looking at the world. William Lee, largely Lee to his friends (an astonishing Daniel Craig), …
Amy Liptrot’s breathtakingly poignant and unsparing memoir The Outrun has been acclaimed by critics and adored by readers across the world since its 2016 publication. Eight years later, the book loses none of its effect – the description of a very personal journey through familial mental illness, addiction, substance abuse, …
I’ve avoided reading Colleen Hoover’s It Ends With Us for years now. As an avid reader who is also constantly on social media, the novels of Colleen Hoover have been plastered all over TikTok and Instagram, none with such veracity as It Ends With Us and its sequel, It Begins …
This inspired by true events biopic is crowd-pleasing cinema at its best. An ordinary Joe goes toe to toe with heartless billionaires, conniving moneylenders and unfair bureaucracy all in an attempt to make life better and easier for people like him. Will he succeed?? The set-up answers its own question, …
Ripley is the latest adaptation of Talented Mr. Ripley, this time starring Andrew Scott in the lead role; as Tom Ripley, a man who is introduced to Dickie Greenleaf’s leisurely lifestyle and quickly gets under his skin and eventually kills him – taking over his identity in a bid to become Greenleaf. It’s a queer …
I appreciate all genres of cinema. It’s true: there’s no style of storytelling or any fictional setting that automatically puts me off – I genuinely believe all genres have their respective masterpieces. That said, like any viewer, I have my personal preferences, and, indeed, there are a few types of …