Based on Jennie Rooney’s 2013 novel, 'Red Joan' tells the tale of pensioner Joan, played with vulnerable venerability by Judi Dench, who is accused of having engaged in espionage during the Cold War on behalf of the Russians. The film follows her inquisition while skipping to flashbacks of her youth at Cambridge while becoming embroiled with dreamy Russian Marxist Leo and his alluring cousin Sonya. Inspired by the story of Melita Norwood, whose real life exploits are documented as having been rather less twee than the film would have us believe.

'Red Joan' nonetheless works as a solid book to film adaptation that captures the palpable fear of communism in Britain in a way few films in the genre have done before. Lindsay Shapero’s screenplay works female empowerment into the script with wily charm while still leaving plenty of intrigue and a spiralling plot that heaps betrayal upon betrayal. As the enigmatic Sonya, played by Tereza Srbova with drawling glamour, states "nobody would suspect us- we’re women" and certainly it is wildly exciting to have a woman front and centre of a spy story, even if the film’s conclusion rather disappointingly winds up reverting back to type with a half-hearted sub plot concerning Joan’s grown, disapproving son coming on side.

Sophie Cookson is full of bright brilliance as Joan’s younger counterpart, dashing wide-eyed around Cambridge and surreptitiously sneaking core intel through microscopic cameras with schoolgirl propriety. Equally stellar is Stephen Cambell Moore as Max, our heroine’s true ally and progressive professor who, at times, appears a heavily romanticised problematic fave but who nevertheless injects what would otherwise be a gratifyingly average teacher-student romance with sincerity rather than cynicism.

Paul Hart’s demonic reinterpretation of the Bard’s best -loved comment on regicide and tyranny falls remarkably flat. Hart’s production attempts to incorporate the musical talents of its cast to create a cacophony of sound to accompany the terrible tale of ambition, greed and murder. Yet the jagged interruptions of various versions of Johnny Cash and the Rolling Stones seem to take the piece out of itself and far from subverting the darker themes or enhancing a sense of unease and foreboding, they simply read as inauthentic.

Following the ascension of Macbeth to the throne of Scotland a cover of Frank Sinatra’s L.O.V.E accompanies the monarchs dance and far from being a moment of subversive hilarity or imbuing the moment with a deeper disturbance seemed frankly, out of place. Elsewhere the production is riddled with structural inconsistencies through ill-thought through gender swaps. Banquo and Fleance become woman and girl, causing one to question whether Lady Macbeth’s descent into madness isn’t rather postponed; given it is originally the brutality and wasteful murder of Macduff’s wife and children that provides the ultimate catalyst for her demise. Hart works around the question of witches by animating an army of military undead as a cohesive voice of supernatural prophecy, which given the over-reliance on demonic imagery seems rather a missed opportunity for occult visuals.

Despite the clear effort exerted by the production team to work the concept of the Macbeth's owning a hotel in hell, as one long neon sign flickers out the ‘O’ and ‘T’ periodically to spell ‘HEL’ atop three hotel room doors each baring the number 6, the concept seems rather haphazardly hustled together. Given that the play’s themes are already alarmingly obvious the extension of this into the slightly campy set design in the Watermill’s intimate, murky interior does very little to transport us to Scotland’s harrowing heaths and the Macbeths fortress. Likewise Emma McDonald and Billy Postlethwaite as our cunning bloodthirsty couple shimmer with overly zealous determination to really sell it to us without the crucial connection between them that makes the exploit so electrifying. Victoria Blunt’s Malcom is one of few standouts in an overwhelmingly young cast, bristling with regal recalcitrance and poignant pragmatism and despite the productions desperate need for dramaturgical re-evaluation, the sight of a gender equal cast in regional theatre is genuinely heartening.

‘Little’ is nothing if not completely and embarrassingly predictable. As I sat waiting for the movie to start I couldn’t help but cringe at the poster displayed in front of me with the tag line: "Her Boss from Hell Woke Up Like This" with arrows pointing to relevant characters just in case the age, attire and cartoonish poses of the actors wasn’t hint enough for us. I knew I was safe in the land of cliches and tired old formulas. Mean boss who at heart is just a hurt child needing some TLC, the side kick with a heart of gold who needs to find her courage and a dash of unexplained magic in an otherwise normal world and we have lift off!

These story lines have been rehashed so many times that we can all guess the entire plot and the ending just by looking at the poster! I can almost hear the conversation in the board room: Lets do another body swap big/little movie again. Yeah but we’ve done all the different varieties already. Boy to man, man to boy, woman to girl, girl to woman, boy to girl, man to dog… maybe we should come up with new idea. HOW ABOUT AN ALL BLACK CAST!!!! No one ever thought of that before! actually yeah, they just did that with ‘What Men Want’! Nevermind, we can still make a ton of money!!!

But fear not. Not all is not lost with this movie. There are three reasons why you will still very much enjoy it and those reasons are Issa Rae as April, Regina Hall as Jordan Sanders and 14-year-old Marsai Martin as young Jordan. These women bring all their comedic timing, physical acting abilities and charm to the table and manage to turn a badly written script and a painfully mediocre production into a reasonably enjoyable movie.

'Pond Life' is written by playwright Richard Cameron and directed by debuting feature film director Bill Buckhurst. a quick Google search for the film yields this little synopsis:
“Summertime, 1994. In a quiet mining village just outside Doncaster, a rumour stirs about the legend of a giant carp in the nearby decoy ponds. Trevor takes watch one night at the water's edge. The following night, he decides to lead a brigade of young friends and neighbours on a fishing expedition. In a world of broken families, cassette tapes and rumbling political fever, these friends, each with their own struggles to bear, share a moment of harmony that they will never forget.”

Firstly, let me be clear, I liked this movie as I was watching it and can honestly say it was an enjoyable 100 minutes. If I weren’t writing a review about it I probably would’ve left it at that. Would I tell other people they should watch it? Not sure. Maybe. Would I watch it again as soon as I got the chance? Highly doubtful. Would I forget most of the plot and possibly even the name within a year? Probably!

At first glance ‘Pond Life’ is reminiscent of those glorious 90s “British working class movies” such as ‘The Full Monty’ and ‘Brassed Off’. But whereas those movies had a lot of anger at their core and used humour and storytelling to bring attention to real issues of unemployment, poverty and oppression of the working class, ‘Pond Life’ only hints at those issues half heartedly and seems to exploit the image of the “delinquent youths” from the 90s with their dirt bikes and their bright coloured nylon tracksuits, sitting on discarded sofas on the grass, for a cool and retro aesthetics. That’s the only reason I can think of for it being set in the early 90s, as the plot does not demanded it in any way.

An iconic, instant classic that we watch in decades to come it might not be, but ‘Pond Life’ boasts beautiful cinematography, a reasonably interesting plot that unfolds in a timely manner and treats it’s subject matter with due sensitivity and most importantly brilliant acting from it’s main characters, the hapless, yet caring and sweet Trevor played by Tom Varey and Pogo, the young autistic protagonist of the story played beautifully by Esme Creed-Miles.

Set against the backdrop of Lima’s Japanese embassy hostage crisis of 1996-7, 'Bel Canto' is a confusing concoction. Based on the novel of the same name by Ann Pratchett, more than once it falls victim to the adage that one can make a good film out of a bad book, but not necessarily out of a good one.

It’s an intriguing enough premise, but this uneven adaptation takes a long time to work out what sort of film it’s trying to be, jack-knifing from searingly gritty to almost cloyingly saccharine, and relying on intrusive music to cover up any incongruity and inform us what we ought to be feeling at any given point. It might be possible to overlook this were it not for the fact that Julianne Moore, playing arguably the film’s central figure in operatic soprano Roxanne Coss, is clearly lip-syncing, and far too little has been done to convince us otherwise. One could dismiss this as a small gripe, but when the title of the film is an allusion to this character’s voice, when so much has been made of Moore’s preparation for embodying the role of the famous singer, and when director Paul Weitz insists on lingering on her (at times) blatantly unsynchronised performance for longer than it can bear the weight of our scrutiny, it is so bathetic as to undermine almost the entirety of the rest of the piece. More than once I wondered if this was a comedy in deep cover.

That’s not to say there isn’t fine work on display here. Once the film has waded through its unfocused first act and the stilted dialogue has given way to meatier fare, an engrossing story begins to emerge from the woodwork. There’s a roster of valiant supporting performances, particularly from Sebastian Koch as a hard-bitten and world-weary Red Cross worker and Tenoch Huerta as Comandante Benjamin, who as the crisis drags into days, and eventually weeks, plays the hopelessness of his situation with an air of quietly tragic resignation.

There are also achingly beautiful moments peppered throughout, presented without fanfare, that seem to brilliantly capture the strange interplay of light and dark that must characterise situations such as these. After being allowed outside for the first time in weeks, two silver-haired hostages run giddily about a sunlit garden. “They look like children,” remarks the Comandante. “What does that make you,” asks a fellow insurgent, “their mother?”

Against the odds, one leaves this undeniably patchy curio with a genuine lump in the throat. It hits its emotional beats so stealthily that when the inevitable conclusion plays out, you find yourself mourning characters in whom you weren’t even aware you were invested, and we are treated to a masterfully queasy sequence detailing the juxtaposition of how the world at large views the end of the hostage crisis, versus how the characters themselves feel having lived through it. A starker contrast you’d be hard-pushed to find.

Good things cannot last, however, and Weitz hubristically returns us to the unintentionally hilarious spectacle of Moore, ordinarily so pitch-perfect, failing to convince us of her operatic pipes. For an actor of Moore’s calibre, it’s nothing short of baffling. She also has the ignominy of dealing with much of the clunkier dialogue, which she does with very little of her usual flare, all of which leads to the frustrating conclusion that both the script and the musical sequences could have done with some fairly brutal cutting, as what had the potential to be an absolutely sterling piece of drama now feels more like an occasionally interesting dud. For all its faults, however, 'Bel Canto' offers us an engaging story, replete with memorable moments of deftness and humanity, and uncomfortable reminders that the tussles between good and evil presented to us in the news are wont to be misleading, and that much as we might wish otherwise, nothing is ever black and white.

‘What Men Want’ isn’t going to blow your mind. It’s neither original nor is it as defiantly feminist as many of us would wish it to be. It faithfully sticks to the Rom-Com formula and delivers all the clichés and tired jokes that you might expect.

Loosely based on the 2000 film ‘What Women Want’ it follows the adventures of Ali Davis, a sports agent who is constantly passed up for partnership and excluded by her white male colleagues. Never mind that she represents the likes of Serena Williams and many other talented and successful female athletes, Ali is not happy until she’s had the respect of a baby-star basketball player just starting out. And that is going to be her golden ticket into the exclusive boy’s club.

The plot is messy, the sub plots are under developed and most of the comedic talent in the film is wasted. I mean for heaven’s sake Max Greenfield AKA ‘Schmidt’ from ‘New Girl’ barely has two lines as the rival agent Kevin and Tracy Morgan as Joe “Dolla” pretty much spends the whole time telling fart jokes.

There is however one major silver lining and that is the fact that the makers of this movie had the good sense to cast Taraji P Henson as the leading lady. My God can this woman act! Her charm and charisma saves the most awkward moments and makes the whole experience thoroughly enjoyable. Her onscreen chemistry with Aldis Hodge who plays her love interest Will is explosive but she also shows vulnerability and a tenderness that offsets her brashness beautifully without compromising her strength and dominant position. There’s a delightful and actually quite hilarious cameo by Erykah Badu as the psychic who gives Ali the power to hear men’s thoughts. Overall quite an entertaining movie.

'Gender', directed by Aleksandra Czenczek and written by Gisele Mauvecin, depicts project manager Emma’s (Gisele Mauvecin), struggle to be seen as an equal and as viable candidate for a senior position in her company. We see Emma working all hours of the day to the detriment of other areas of her life, however despite all of this, her efforts are thwarted by an unfairly rigged system denying her due to prejudices based on her gender. The cinematography overall is very well executed and the film has the feel approaching that of a much bigger budget feature length film. The shots are clean and fluid and it is well woven together visually. The soundtrack is brilliantly composed and it is partially what sells the high end nature of the film. It is not over done and it is great at underpinning the action as it unfolds in a non intrusive sense, that layers it up and makes it fuller.

Performance wise, it is very naturalistic overall and there were only a few moments with the big boss (Jamie Lee-Hill) who verged on being a somewhat pantomimic caricature of a big bad sexist. However, there are some elements that feel as if they are missing. For one, their office is a very white environment. However, both our main character and her boss Anna (Yulia Romanova) have migrated from other parts of the world to work in this London branch, yet only their gender is mentioned as being a barrier to progression. However, as we are all coming to learn, the world is intersectional. So not only will they have to face gender bias, but also the potential biases that come from being a migrant. Both actors read relatively well and it is very refreshing to see two actors, who’s first language isn’t English, without having them be the “Other”, it’s just that within a film that seeks to address prejudice, it is short sighted to ignore the interweaving of these things.

It was a great twist, to have her boss who is a woman, be in some way complicit with the decision to promote her less accomplished male colleague (David Wayman) ahead of her. A great reminder that even if we come from an oppressed group, we can still be puppets of the system enacting those injustices out upon those who face the same hardships as us. However, it is very based in a narrative that there is one metric of success, and that we must all adhere to it, even though it was created and is upheld by those who would keep us out. So rather than redefine what success looks like, we mutilate ourselves in order to emulate and to get a approval from those above who will only allow individuals not in the “club”, just far enough to appease and cajole.

It was well executed and well performed, it just seemed as if it wasn’t saying anything wildly new or in a fresh way. We need more films to get people to think and to address their behaviours for sure and this will certainly act as a reminder, it just could have reached a little further in a more nuanced way for a 2019 audience.

David Robert Mitchell’s thrillingly tantalising LA looms like a glistening crown of thorny trinkets with owl headed women lurching at their prey, an unidentified dog killer (or killers, are there more of them?) on the loose, and a gothic rock group named Jesus and the Brides of Dracula, whose albums hide clues to the film’s meta mystery. Part neo-noir, part fantastically gruesome horror, 'Under the Silver Lake' is a nihilistic nod to the noir genre and a pessimistically poised attack at pop culture.

Mitchell is perhaps overly ambitious in terms of structure at times. There are more than a few plot holes in store and several characters dip in and out of the screen who rarely are given much development or backstory. 'Under the Silver Lake' feels like a film that has festered for a little too long in the mind of its creator, with a result that feels rather too far-fetched for its targeted attack on toxic masculinity and current culture to potently deliver. However, the soundtrack is always rapturously original and Michael Perry’s set design rakes in a pleasing plethora of quality scenes. Similarly, the skilfully sharp cinematography by Mike Gioulakis melds mellifluously with Mitchell’s penetrating script filled with keen and cutting observations of our symbolically saturated society.

Andrew Garfield takes a turn away from his comfortable awkwardly charming romantic lead role to star as the film’s plausibly pervy antihero whose quest to discover the truth behind the death of literal girl-next-door Sarah, played by Riley Keough, takes him to the cavernous underworld of LA’s elite. There’s an overwhelming sense of Mitchell’s malaise and abject abhorrence of modern life. An aged composer, supposedly the omnipotent overlord of all popular music to have existed since the 1960s comments that instant hits are "as common as tits and hamburgers" and amidst the film’s pseudo thriller fantasy lies a critique of patriarchy filtered through the unflinchingly objectifying gaze of its protagonist. It’s an admirable attempt, but the inconsistencies in tone fail to solidify the case against male driven hierarchies and it’s unclear whether we should be laughing along with the innumerable close ups of women’s buttocks or downright repulsed by the ironic lack of agency any of the women in the film are given.

'Under the Silver Lake' mercilessly mocks millennial trends; our protagonist finds himself at pop up parties filled with hosts who proffer him a pin from a cherry to "pop" a balloon affixed to a dancer’s leotard as they welcome him to "purgatory", elsewhere he is lead down to a crypt where ravers drink at tables made of headstones. The film is peppered with religious references and inverted iconocraphy as one of the Brides looms large as an occult looking Madonna in her black sparkled veil to deliver a mournful cover of LuLu’s ‘To Sir, with Love’. There are certainly more than moments of finesse and for the cynics 'Under the Silver Lake' undeniably provides apathetic answers, but the wildly surrealist slant it often slides into is less unnerving and more downright disheartening.

​There are firsts for everything. Baby Driver gave me a new first; the first time ever - as far as I can remember - where I disliked a film's protagonist in less than 5 minutes. How is that possible while everyone around me loved the film from start to finish?
Let me set the scene: three people approach a bank with guns and masks while a young man sits behind the wheel of a car, innocently listening to music. And he's got great taste in music, I tell you that! He starts singing along, tapping the wheel, as we all do. But then he starts going overboard, banging on the outside of the car and making a huge fuss about how much he is loving his music all the while grimacing in the most arrogant cocky way that only a sure as heck, arrogant, cocky kind of late teen/early twenties male can do. I despise this person immediately. I want him to shut up and stop what he's doing, thinking he's the king of the world without the charm of a young DiCaprio. And I usually love Ansel Elgort. But this introduction to Baby made it really hard. I like self-assured, confident people as much as the next person, but I despise arrogance. I. Cant. Stand. It. Even if the guy wasn't supposed to be an inconspicuous getaway driver - which he is spectacularly failing at - this display of "I'm the greatest person in the universe" isn't endearing at all. At least in my book. Thankfully our friendly neighbourhood (not as much friendly as violent) bank robbers don't take long and we're off on our first car chase. And this is where Baby Driver truly shines.

Director Edward Wright decided to time all action sequences to the music Baby is listening to. It is absolutely brilliant! The choreography in conjunction with the earworm-worthy music makes for a mesmerising style that almost makes 'Baby Driver' into an action musical of sorts. The action pieces are fantastic. The chase sequences are fast, precise, insane and utterly exhilarating. And the film doesn't stop there. Plenty of non driving action scenes appear in the second half of the film, not any less impressive than their car chase big brothers. Wright knows how to give us shiny visuals combined with awesome soundtracks and 'Baby Driver' is no different. It looks great, it sounds even better. If only it had established a likeable protagonist I would have loved this film. 

Elgort is joined by Kevin Spacey, Jamie Foxx, Jon Hamm, Eiza González and Lily James. Despite the star power the characters are mere caricatures than fully realised people. Everyone is introduced with a code name and you never really get to dig deeper, even with our hero. Yes, we do find out his parents died in a car crash when he was young; which also gave him his tinnitus. And that he grew up with a loving, deaf foster father (how hard it must be for a deaf, black, wheelchair bound man to be considered as a foster parent on his own baffles my mind), who he is clearly very close with. But all that feels like reading someone's online profile. You don't really get to know the person behind it all and that is where the film ultimately failed for me. I did not care about any of the characters.

We have pretty much all ingredients of your usual superhero origin story in 'Baby Driver'. Little boy witnesses his parents death in a car accident, gets an ailment (tinnitus) which somehow turns him into a superhero as he has to listen to music constantly to drown it out, and apparently that enables him to be the world's greatest driver and parkour artiste. Unfortunately Baby never turns into the superhero he is set up to be. He is clearly uncomfortable with the violence he is being part of and when he finally springs into action it felt hollow, because he was causing as much violence, carnage and - if I'm not mistaken - death as the people he was going up against. What was his point again?

Style over substance. That sums up 'Baby Driver' for me. Nothing wrong with that, but personally I need charismatic and/or memorable characters. And there were none. On top of all that the film wastes a great opportunity at the end, where we are instead greeted by an almost inconsequential resolution to the events we've witnessed. Our lead character seems unchanged by what he endured. Character development: non-existent. The action was great and I'll remember the soundtrack, that's something.

Whichever way this balance is found, vignettes of happier/earlier days would have pulled me in the story and in Robyn’s psyche a lot more, to probably punch harder as the play ends. The loftier the start, the bigger the crash.

Picking up a year later, in terms of the story and the production, the start to season 2 is a rocky one, with the actors struggling to re-inhabit their roles. The delivery is stilted and their movements stuttery, but once they find their groove again, things really improve drastically and then continue to do so right through to the emotional conclusions. There are great lines and references from the beginning, but it's not until episode three, You and Me, that 'History' really begins to excel, both comedically and emotionally. As the dynamics between the characters becomes both more natural and authentic in their interactions and some of the emotional beats become more keenly felt.

From episode three onwards, there is clearly a lot more confidence and comfort in both the writing and direction and, even more so, in the performances. 'History' is a very talkative piece, but there comes some moments when words are no longer needed, and Jack Tracy - both as a writer, director, and as an actor - is unafraid to let things play out almost silently. This is most visible and profound in the moment's when he is confronted by stark truths and realisations. In one of the episodes, the character of Jamie is taking a selfie with a friend who insists that they show no teeth, prompting him to (as far as I'm aware) to invent something called 'Smising' wherein his face remains stoic whilst his eyes smile. He really needs to come up for a term for the dramatic version of this phenomenon, because - whether it's a friend highlighting how pain exists outside of his own or when he's receiving a voicemail that serves to convey just how much pain he himself is on the verge of inflicting upon others - It's all in his eyes, and it's beautifully done.

Javier Bardem doesn’t break any new ground. He is channelling his Bond villain persona in a period costume on the high seas. Like every other Sparrow nemesis before him, he is a victim of the supernatural and wants to make Sparrow pay. Only difference, Salazar isn’t a pirate but a pirate hunter. Everything else, the same.

The film looks great, the CGI is state of the art, but deep down it is missing a soul. Superficial beauty with no charm or personality. And the few scenes that were a hoot to watch lost their impact because I had seen them dozens of times in the trailers or the promo footage playing before 'Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.2'.

None of this would matter as much if the characters were more interesting. I did not care about any of them. How is that even possible? Even Jack Sparrow. He is the same Jack we have seen in Curse of the Black Pearl and all subsequent films. He hasn’t evolved. While that might be entertaining to some, I can’t help but be bored. With some funny bits splashed here and there, Salazar’s Revenge still manages to entertain. Good action sequences, a few character highlights and a tongue in cheek approach help elevate the film.

In the final act is when the films faces its biggest problems. The moral ambiguity that fuelled much of the interesting conflict is abandoned. Instead the plot is reliant on making twists and turns, which haven’t been earned and end up feeling unsatisfying and borderline silly, with muddy motivations being at the core of the problem. In the end 'Miss Sloane' offers some interesting ideas and engaging moments, but ultimately feels falls well short of its full potential.

While Jamie (Jack Tracy) is the clear star of the show, the other characters are just as interesting and captivating once you get to know them. Especially William (William Cohen) and Matthew (Jacob Seidman), who round out the new trio of friends post-breakup, make for wonderful additions to the show and bring out a new side in Jamie. I have to admit that Episode 4 'Saying Yes', which I immediately dubbed the “friendship episode”, was my absolute favourite and these three shine throughout.

Jumping from one hook-up to the next Jamie is desperately trying to fill the void left by Jared. He needs them to feel good about himself and fight his loneliness. He cannot be alone even for a minute. This is perfectly captured in a scene where we see Jamie clinging to his phone like a lifeline. When the battery is empty and he has to wait for the first tiny bit to recharge before being able to use it again, his life literally comes to a stop. He sits on the floor, leaning against the wall that has the phone charger plugged into it, staring at the lifeless device, not sure what to do. Once it comes back to life he immediately comes out of the catatonic state he was in. The series has a few powerful moments like these, but I don’t want to give too much away.

Not knowing what’s to come is intriguing. Suspense is the lifeblood of a good story. I love walking into the cinema not knowing anything about the film I’m about to watch. It doesn’t happen often, hardly ever if I’m totally honest. Trailers nowadays spoil most of the plot points. It is such a different experience viewing a film without any preconceived notions. So I was really excited sitting down for 'A Quiet Passion' in a cosy little cinema just off Oxford Street.
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The film is a period drama, not my favourite genre. A biopic, even worse. About the life of Emily Dickinson, a poet! I chuckle to myself, remembering my experience with another poetry film, 'Paterson', a few weeks ago, and readying myself for a lengthy two hours. Within a few minutes the film has me truly chuckling at the snappy performances and witty dialogue firing left and right. The Dickinson family has you engaged from the first moment.

The cinematography is intimate, yet distant. Dickinson hardly ever left her homestead, she never married and turned into a recluse in later years, so most of the film takes place inside the house. The mostly stagnant camera captures that claustrophobic feel well, which draws even more attention to scenes where it is moving, like the 360 degree pan near the start and end of the film, showing the family (or what’s left of it) in the living-room. The one thing I could have lived without was the aging family portraits to show the passage of time, thereby introducing new actors for certain characters. Instead of showing every single member of the family by themselves a family portrait would’ve cut down on this rather repetitive sequence.

As most biopics I found 'A Quiet Passion' to be checklist-y, jumping from one seemingly important or well-known event to the next. The film doesn’t have as much flow to the narrative as I'd have liked. But the captivating performances more than make up for any shortcomings in that regard. Even the poetry readings Cynthia Nixon does throughout the film in form of a voice-over are interesting and fitting. A stark contrast to what I thought of the same technique used in 'Paterson'. Nixon delivers the prose eloquently, keeping her read truthful, vibrant and engaging.

Overall solid performances and witty dialogue make 'A Quiet Passion' an entertaining framework for Emily Dickinson’s poetry.

In an almost parallel storyline, with again an esthetics that brilliantly captures the 90s, we’re also acquainted with adult Massimo (Valerio Mastandrea), a reserved journalist, who must finally tackle his childhood trauma as he prepares to sell his parents’ home.

This home is the place of the film’s inciting incident: Massimo’s mother’s death. Though its place in the film makes a lot of sense, and Massimo’s family’s gauche way of handling the situation is completely human, the consequences on Massimo’s adult storyline (what is shown of it) was more difficult to fully grasp. And though this was the entire point of the film, Massimo’s weaknesses as an adult, in spite of having worked in Sarajevo, held a good career as a sports journalist as well as experiencing tremendous success when responding to a reader about motherly love (or lack thereof. This moment is by the way the only comic relief of the film), made it hard to fully route for his character. How can an intelligent adult be in that much denial without anyone ever saying anything? How can a child who seems so observant become an adult who, in spite of his job, accepts what he is told as pure truth without ever challenging his father or re-examining the facts? He of course eventually does, but it’s nearly impossible to believe it would have taken him that long, especially given his professional background and his apparently otherwise normal mental health, give or take a few panic attacks (which one might expect of someone who has seen the horrors of war first hand).

This aside, the film, childhood and adult moments alike, manages to bring us back to our own childhood fairy tales, (for me, strangely, it was Gina Lollobrigida’s Blue Fairy from a 1970s Pinocchio).  Seeing childhood creatures still haunting adulthood, though outlandish to the logical mind, may be highly relatable to many.

Similarly, one of my favourite moments showed teen Massimo (Dario Dal Pero) visit a wealthy friend in a gorgeous old house, and sitting still as the other teen misbehaves with his mother (the wonderful Emmanuelle Devos who I was hoping would play a more important part in the film). The scene was fairly random and only relevant to the overall story as it showed Massimo’s yearning for a mother persist throughout his teens. Though it does bring narrative value to the film, it doesn’t seem essential to tell the story. But there is something almost otherworldly, something deliciously French and Italian and which in a way also captures the emotional stakes of the film so much more than many slices of Massimo’s adult life. It is that sense of nostalgia and “out of time-ness” which kept me hooked, and later led me home daydreaming, a head full of fond memories of the past and longing for the magic moments ahead.

A gorgeous and heartfelt mess.

Spoilers for 'John Wick' (the first one) but then it’s not much more than a movie about an angry Keanu Reeves killing everyone he meets, so maybe not worry about it too much.

Anyway, chapter 2 takes place in the immediate aftermath of the first movie, John Wick (Keanu Reeves) has killed everyone he set out to kill plus a few people who were dumb enough to try and kill him in return, and now he’s looking for his stolen car. We open with him finding it in the process of eliminating another branch of the Russian mafia in a pretty epic gun fight slash car chase sequence just to tie up loose ends before we move on.
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John goes home with his new dog and prepares to settle in to retirement once more, but unfortunately for him he barely has time to put his feet up before there’s knock at his door. It seems word has gotten out that he’s been on a killing spree and some have presumed this means he is back to work and an old acquaintance is at his door to call in a debt he is owed. John turns him down and our new villain proceeds to aggressively threaten him into accepting the deal despite everyone around him being able to see what a stupid idea that is.

 This is the main problem of the film, the first 'John Wick' was about the idiot son of a gangster accidentally making enemies of the most dangerous assassin who ever lived because he’s an idiot. In this film we have a relatively uninteresting sociopath gangster (or something, I’m not actually sure what his deal was) deliberately and repeatedly making enemies of the most dangerous assassin who ever lived because presumably he’s an even bigger idiot.

This is actually a huge disconnect for me, the first movie was a clever revenge story that whilst the “bad guys” were clearly bad guys our hero was also basically a bad guy and the script wouldn’t have required too much manipulation to turn it into a horror movie where John Wick relentless hunts and murders a bunch of people who whilst far from being saints don’t necessarily deserve a gruesome death.
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Coupled with some amazing fight sequences and a return to form for Keanu, seriously he was born to play this character, the first movie was kind of an unexpected surprise. Simplistic maybe but it did what it did to perfection and constructed an elaborate world with it’s own mythology and rules that though we only scrapped the surface, was clearly very well thought out and opened up an infinite amount of possibility.

This time around we get to see a lot more of this secret world but as with any mystery the more you know the less interesting it is. The move to another branch of the Continental in Rome is almost meaningless and Lawrence Fishbourne commanding an army of homeless people and pigeons is actually kind of silly, they only serve to over complicate the world. In addition it all makes the rules of both this world and the assassins guild within it much less clear. There’s a cool scene where Keanu and Common walk through a crowded area covertly firing silenced pistols at each other, and it’s a fun idea, but why do they do it, from a practical standpoint.

This “secret” society doesn’t seem too concerned with secrecy, the number of people aware of it’s existence seems to be growing beyond it’s assassin base and the assassins themselves don’t seem too concerned about openly firing their guns in public, starting fist fights in the street, and equate wandering into a building and shooting everyone they meet as the same thing as a meticulously planned assassination. So the world has been dumbed down a bit and the villain has been dumbed down a lot and it’s impossible to have the same unique impact as the first movie, so … did I like this? I feel like I shouldn’t like this.

Okay, so on a positive side it is basically more of the same from the first movie, cool action, interesting world building, cool action, Keanu Reeves owning the show and cool action. I mean it’s mostly cool action, that’s kind of why we’re here, and it does it well just not quite as well as the first movie and as I’ve said it’s impossible to create the same experience a second time around. This is basically a less interesting plot with less likeable characters. It comes to life a little when John becomes the target of the not-so-secret assassins society and we meet a handful of seemingly unique characters who come after him but they all just turn out to be nameless stunt people with guns for shooting and fists for punching and it’s just a whole lot of nothing.

So it’s good for what is more or less a two hour fight scene but I suppose you’d do just as well watching the first one again. You won’t be disappointed but you probably won’t be rushing to watch it a second time.