Six year old Frida (Laia Artigas), recently orphaned after the death of her mother, is taken in by her uncle Esteve (David Verdaguer) and aunt Marga (Bruna Cusi), moving from her grandparents home to live with them and her three year old cousin Anna (Paula Robles). Given free rein by...
Most of us cinephiles have formative films, the ones that turned us from consumers into viewers and began the process of forming a lifelong love of movies. Mine was Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. I confess I’m surprised by the fact that, for more than a handful of people,...
The 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy cast a long shadow over the second half of the 20th century and as its 30th anniversary approached there were several films that looked, some more directly than others, at its lasting echoes. In 1991 we had Oliver Stone’s conspiracy fueled JFK,...
Author’s Introduction When I was young, my parents were pretty strict about what I was and wasn’t allowed to watch. My viewing had to remain within appropriate age boundaries. I couldn’t get into higher certificate films at the cinema or rent them on video because at 15 I still looked...
Last week I talked about Jurassic Park and how, at 11, it felt like my movie. Sleepless in Seattle isn’t that. It’s my mum’s movie. I honestly don’t know where I got the movie bug, none of my family are cinephiles. My parents, generally speaking, like their movies safe. I...
Billy (Alex Lawther) is a flamboyant gay kid, largely estranged from his father (Larry Pine), until he has to move for the last year of high school when his beloved mother (Bette Midler) is ‘taken ill’. In a conservative school, Billy doesn’t fit in and is at one point beaten...
When I was very little I wanted to be a paleontologist. By the age of 11 this had changed, because I had become obsessed with movies, but I was still very interested in dinosaurs and would pick up fossils whenever we went to a (British) beach on holiday. I had...
I didn’t grow up with Tina Turner’s music. The first time I was aware of her was through her 1991 blockbuster Simply The Best collection, which swept up the highlights of the second phase of her career and seemed to be in every single CD collection I saw in the...
I have been finding many of the more political films I’ve been watching for this series more relevant than I’d like, and Romper Stomper, sadly, doesn’t feel like an exception in that respect. Neo-nazism is again on the rise, enabled and encouraged by the so called Alt Right. Much of...