Tag: Romance
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If Beale Street Could Talk.
In early 2017, I saw and reviewed Moonlight – Barry Jenkins’ remarkable coming of age story about sexuality, poverty and masculinity. Almost two years later, to the day, I am sitting down to review the directors’ next film, If Beale Street Could Talk. American movie romance doesn’t come much more sublime than this. Director Barry Jenkins…
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The Big Sick.
From Jenny Slate’s desperately underrated Obvious Child to the wit and woe of The Skeleton Twins, American indie cinema has had a lot to say about modern romance in recent years. With the huge success of Aziz Ansari’s hit Netflix series Master of None and more recently the deeply cynical comical tragedy Friends from College, we find ourselves in a new…
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Moonlight.
From its first intoxicating moment, to its last; Moonlight is the sensational underdog of this year’s American award season. Capturing the life and mind-set of a young boy entering adulthood in Miami, Moonlight captures the ugliness of adolescence, the agony of addiction and the frustration of growing up as a young, black, gay man in…
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Café Society.
For the last year I’ve been terribly aware of being an apologetic Woody Allen fan. This is of course a conversation for another time but it makes me even more aware of whether or not his latest work either flops or soars. I could breath a sigh of relief when Midnight in Paris rolled into…
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Maggie’s Plan.
Written, directed and produced by Rebecca Miller, Maggie’s Plan is a spontaneous and whimsical piece of magic starring the impeccable Greta Gerwig. We meet Maggie on the cusp of a life altering decision. Making the choice to artificially inseminate herself with the produce of an aspiring pickle entrepreneur, Maggie is looking towards motherhood – content…
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Sunset Song.
It’s been four years since the work of Terence Davies last graced our screens, in the form of the exquisite The Deep Blue Sea. Now he returns with Sunset Song, an adaptation of the Lewis Grassic Gibbon novel of the same name. I first fell in love with Davies’ work when I saw a double…
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Carol.
Deeply romantic and tantalizingly erotic, Carol is the latest from film maker Todd Haynes. Here, the director brings the same period-specific aesthetics that he created in his stunning television adaptation of Mildred Pierce. Haynes is no stranger to capturing particular times and places on screen. His most prestigious film to date being Far From Heaven,…
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Brooklyn.
Eilis Lacey is a bright-eyed and fresh-faced young Irish girl, working in a village food store, when we first meet her. It’s apparent from the off-set that, although devoted to her family and home, Eilis longs for greater things beyond her country’s borders. We join her on her voyage across the sea to a new…
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Wings of Desire.
Wim Wenders’ 1987 masterpiece has a lot to say about Berlin, humanity, life and death. Unexpectedly meta and deeply romantic – Wings of Desire remains a European contemporary classic; something of a youngest child to the German New Wave movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Bruno Ganz play Damiel, one of the many angels who…
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Trainwreck.
Stoner-comedy king Judd Apatow and comedian/writer Amy Schumer uncomfortably join forces to bring us Trainwreck. Unconventional, unpredictable and unapologetic, Trainwreck takes the rom-com formula, a blunt, crass feminist lead and a few of Apatow’s typical conventions and mixes them all up in a cocktail shaker. The result: a mildly-amusing, badly-blended, sharp-tasting sex-comedy which reeks of…
Hannah McHaffie 