A look at A Haunting In Venice (PG)
Kenneth Branagh is back for his third role as Agatha Christie’s famous private detective Hercule Poirot in this murder mystery set in a huge Venice palazzo.
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A look at Oppenheimer (MA 15+)
How should we regard brilliant scientist J Robert Oppenheimer, the brain behind the invention of the planet’s first atomic bombs. Was he a 20th century Frankenstein or just a highly motivated inventor?
Continue readingA look at Marlowe (MA 15+)
Raymond Chandler wrote a number of books centred on rugged private detective Philip Marlowe and this film features Liam Neeson in the central role.
Now, Neeson is no Humphrey Bogart and although he exudes the appropriate dose of world weariness he’s perhaps a tad too old to be playing a tough PI. Nevertheless, he starts off with the classic Marlowe introductory scene: a glamorous blonde is visiting his office to find out where her ex-lover might be.
Continue readingA look at The Conference
A movie based entirely about a meeting between 15 men and a lone female secretary shouldn’t promise anything out of the ordinary.
But in mid-January 1942, 15 Germans – particularly top military, SS, Nazi party and Gestapo officers – and also with half-a-dozen top civilian departmental heads there as well – meet to discuss how they were going to dispose of a large proportion of Europe’s Jews.
Continue readingA look at All Quiet On the Western Front
When you look back at war films you’ve seen not too many are told from the enemy viewpoint.
Tora Tora Tora devotes a fair bit of time to the Japanese pilots and air crews responsible for the surprise 1941 bombing attack on the US fleet stationed at Pearl Harbour in Hawaii.
But it’s only partially about the Japanese military.
In director and co-writer Edward Berger’s World War 1 film I’m reviewing here everything is based around some of the young men in German infantry battalions stationed on the French front lines.
Continue readingA look at Armageddon Time (R)
The Eighties seem like a fair way back now, but for many of us they were our prime years in family life and the work environment.
Here, we’ve got a sixth-grader Paul Graff (Banks Repeta) who is in his final few weeks of primary school in Queens, New York. It’s 1980. Paul befriends an African American classmate Johnny (Jaylin Webb) and the pair play street games and throw a few hoops on the local basketball courts.
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A look at The Phantom Of The Open
Not everyone has a fancy for sports movies or even those based loosely around sports events. But director Craig Roberts has assembled a great cast to tell the story of Maurice Flitcroft, a real-life character who somehow wrangled his way into the 1976 qualifying rounds of the world-famous British Open golf classic.
Continue readingA look at Maigret (M)
Down the decades I’ve seen a number of movie actors play the role of the famous Paris detective, Commissaire Jules Maigret. Most recently Rowan Atkinson was Maigret in four TV epics, but I also recall Richard Harris and the great Charles Laughton stumbling around in the Parisian underworld.
Atkinson was retained for only four telemovies and he always looked slightly comical – not as much, of course, as when he was Mr. Bean – playing Maigret with a pipe clenched between his teeth.
Continue readingA look at Farewell, Mr H
This French beauty is set during the Nazi occupation of Paris in the early 1940s. Master jeweller Mr Haffmann (Daniel Auteuil) had fled Poland with his Jewish family when he was a child and now he feels –quite accurately –the tide turning again.
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Even though we’re nearly eight decades past the end of World War 2 there’s still no shortage of movies about the massive conflict. One of the latest involves a clever scheme dreamed up by behind-the-scenes special secret British agents to convince Hitler and his generals that the Allied were planning a 1943 invasion of Greece as their spearhead into re-taking Europe. Not Sicily and then mainland Italy as was the case involving a huge land and sea operation which remained an ultra-secret.
Continue readingWhy rent a lawyer when you can buy a judge
Teacher Education, Sport, Australian Rules Football,
Every scoreboard tells a story
A Song. A Place. A Time.
With the first dog chosen in the AFL Canine Draft
escape to the Vasse idyll
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