Audiences are going to be divided, but we need to qualify that statement.  The division will come not so much in the usual way of a cinema audience deciding whether the film is good or not – it’s actually great in the way you would hope a Hollywood production of a hit Broadway musical can […]

On December 26 2004, a devastating Indian Ocean tsunami hit the coastline of Thailand.  Everyone who was there and survived the terrible tragedy has a story of their own to tell. The Impossible tells the true story of a certain Spanish family – here portrayed as British middle-class – who experienced and survived the coastline […]

Tom Cruise’s Jack Reacher is the kind of male fantasy character that most men would love to be.  He’s cool, confidant and mysterious, with an almost uncanny Sherlock Holmes-like ability to look at someone and know exactly where they’ve been or what they’ve done, plus he fights with the calm assuredness of someone who knows […]

In the new Judd Apatow comedy This Is 40, the writer/director/producer of raunchy twenty-something comedies has attempted to show a little maturity.  Given that the subject matter is that of a married couple who are both turning 40 in the same week there would have to be a little growing up in the writing, but, […]

The pitch to the studios must have sounded perfect.  Seth Rogen, that likeable schlub of a young comic actor, stuck in the car on a lengthy journey across the country accompanied by his overbearing mother, played of all people by… Barbra Streisand.  It has to be the potential for the occasional moment of comic gold.  […]

If you think of storytelling as a three act play – in other words, something that has a beginning, a middle and an end – Hyde Park on the Hudson feels like a two act production; it has a beginning and a middle, but the third act is missing.  Just when you think there’s perhaps […]