Robin Hood

The film stars off by saying it doesn’t want to bore us with the history. This is a sure-fire guarantee way to piss me off as I quite like history so telling me the history of how English royalty and lordships abused the lower classes in 12-14th century England would be interesting to me. I think saying something like this gets the film off to a bad start because it shows that the filmmakers don’t have a passion for the history of the legend or the time it is set. It doesn’t feel like a project that isn’t backed by love.

Us

The Kane family arrive at their little holiday home which is within spitting distance of the beach where Adelaide (Lupita Nyong'o) experienced a traumatic event that would plague her for the rest of her life. The family do not know of this trauma and spend the day on the very same beach. Shortly after Jason, briefly, disappears the family return home only to experience a restless and traumatic night.

Everybody Knows

 

Sharing a name with a classic Leonard Cohen song, Asghar Farhadi’s film is about dark secrets that aren’t that much of secret. There’s always gossip in the local town as the locals know more than the family thinks they know and much like the Cohen song the uncomfortable truths like ‘Old Black Joe’s still picking cotton’ are ones that everybody knows. About to arrive in this den where everyone knows of the unspoken secret is Laura (Penélope Cruz) who arrives in Spain to attend a wedding with her son and daughter (the latter of whom is kidnapped).

Captain Marvel

Right up to its release Captain Marvel garnered lots of media attention. Some of it focused on the negative anticipation as trolls flooded the Rotten Tomatoes site with defamatory comments about Brie Larsen’s statements on the lack of diversity in film journalism. This of course blew up in the media which, whilst denouncing it, just had the inevitable effect of drawing even more attention to it. Captain Marvel isn’t of course the first superhero movie of the recent superhero movie craze that features a woman as the main protagonist (which was Wonder Woman) but it is the first Marvel movie. This, of course, will be a cause of celebration for some.

Thursday Movie Picks #243: Cold War

There's more to the Cold War than one would have imagined. There's plenty of different narratives, other than the political, from espionage (The Spy Who Came in From the Cold) to ideological battles (any Red Scare films such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers) from the space race (First Man) to sports (Rocky IV). But none is more prevalent than the threat of nuclear warfare as two powerful nations, with an arsenal strong enough to destroy the world hundreds of times over, square off with the World at stake. Perhaps this is why the Cold War makes fascinating cinema, tension comes from incredibly high stakes and in these films the stakes have never been higher.

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