Inherent Vice review
This feature adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice begins with a pretty classic film noir set-up but takes off in a number of very unusual directions from there on out. In the Gordita Beach, California of 1970, Private Eye Larry ‘Doc’ Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix) is visited by his long estranged ex-girlfriend. She’s bringing him a case to solve. Rich … Read more
Into the Woods review
Into the Wood‘s is the latest of Stephen Sondheim‘s musicals to reach the big screen, an adaptation of the 1987 show set in a set in a storybook world and intertwining multiple Brothers Grimm fairytales with a new central plot and characters. Sondheim composed an additional, eventually unused, song for the film version, for Meryl Streep‘s witch character, … Read more
The Theory of Everything review
The Theory of Everything is a formulaic biopic that frequently passes over the very things in its own story that might have made it worth our time, instead settling for reliable tropes and convenient, simplistic plot beats. Despite what you may have heard, this is not a story that centres on Stephen Hawking. The film was adapted … Read more
Unbroken review
The credits for Unbroken, Angelina Jolie‘s big screen biopic of real life Olympian Louis Zamperini, reads like a wish fulfilment rendering of a cinematic supergroup. First you have a script by the Coen Brothers, William Nicholson and Richard LaGravenese, adapting from a novel, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, by Laura Hillenbrand. Then you … Read more