Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)
Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017) Right from the opening scenes, there is no messing about from writer-director-producer Martin McDonagh as he plunges us into the thick of his small town American setting. Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand) has been living with the aftermath of her daughter’s murder for seven months now and wants to know why Bill Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) and the local police force are...
Molly’s Game (2017)
‘A Frat House for Degenerates’: Molly’s Game (2017) The screenwriter Aaron Sorkin was responsible for me breaking a promise some years ago. It was only a promise made to myself, but still. I had vowed that I was never going to turn into one of those guys who binge- watches and gorges out on box-sets. I don’t know; it just seems kind of disrespectful to take a carefully-prepared meal down in one huge gulp. Then I came across...
John Boyne – This House is Haunted (2013)
This House is Haunted I’m always on the look-out for a good modern-day ghost story; and that’s ‘ghost’ as opposed to ‘horror’, although if you want to mix in a bit of both, that’s all right with me. The last time I came across one was several months ago: Closing Time in Neil Gaiman’s 2006 collection, Fragile Things. I’m not a big fan of Gaiman’s longer pieces (I found it impossible to finish American Gods) but some of...
Justice League (2017)
“Now…Let Them Come”: Justice League (2017) Like good ol’ Doc Jekyll quaffing down his nutritious breakfast smoothie and bringing a bad guy out of Hyde-ing, the internet continues to reveal a dark and nasty side to my fellow fantasy film nerds. Seemingly freed from all restraints, they don’t even need to have actually seen a movie anymore before condemning it. Nah, the trailer is enough for gallons of bile to be spewed...
he by John Connolly
An Infinity of Echoes: he by John Connolly “Each evening thereafter he travels to the hospital to be with Lois. “On the ninth day, his son dies.” Was this what it was really like for him at the end, this joyless existence at St. Monica’s Oceana Apartments, ‘at the dawning of the last days’? And here am I, slipping into this curious way that John Connolly has chosen to tell his story. Referring to him only as ‘he’ and ‘him’; and...
Murder on the Orient Express (2017)
The Fracturing of the Soul: Murder on the Orient Express (2017) Early on in this new version of Agatha Christie’s classic murder mystery, Inspector Hercule Poirot (Kenneth Brannagh) declares with passion that there exists only good and evil, with nothing in between. It’s hard to see how any human being, let alone one of his brilliance, can have reached the age he is and still maintain such a rigid – and patently...
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