Demob Happy

Wildly overrated 4/10 ‘Into the Wild‘ is an apaptation of Jon Krakauer’s bestselling true story about Christopher McCandless, a middle-class graduate who dropped out and hit the road in search of “ultimate freedom” in Alaska. Sean Penn’s treatment of the story is an embarassingly self-righteous and romanticised interpretation that says much more about the director [...]

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Re-birth of a Rainbow Nation? 8/10 Based on a novel by South African playwright Athol Fugard, ‘Tsotsi‘ a slickly-produced, powerful drama set in a giant township outside Johannesburg. Presley Chweneyagae stars as the eponymous Tsotsi, a baby-faced assassin forced into surrogate fatherhood by the baby he unwittingly kidnaps during a bungled car jacking. Protecting the [...]

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Things to do In Bruges when you’re dead 7/10 Theatre director Martin McDonagh’s debut film is a memorably off-beat crime film based around two hitmen (played by Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson), sequestered to the Belgian city of Bruges by their foul-mouthed cockney mob boss (Ralph Fiennes). The first two thirds of ‘In Bruges‘ are loose [...]

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La vie en rose of a not-so-Little Sparrow 7/10 ‘La vie en rose‘ (or La Môme – “the kid” – as it is known in its native France) is a refreshingly unconventional biopic of the diminutive chanteuse Edith Piaf. While it charts the singer’s childhood – first in a brothel, then as a street performer [...]

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A life in the mind of Mike “Toilet” Engleby 9/10 Setting aside the fact that ‘Engleby‘ is a gripping psychological thriller of sorts, Sebastian Faulks’ new novel is also a brilliant meditation on the unreliability of memory, on the things lost by the fallability of the human mind. It also examines the unattainability or brevity [...]

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