Sue Torres
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Is there any other reason to live to change the world?
Stories (72/0)
10 of the best TV shows to watch this September
1. The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Twenty-one years on from the release of Peter Jackson's first Lord of the Rings film, a new story of Middle-earth is coming. The Rings of Power – an original tale inspired by Tolkien's writing – is set during the Second Age of Middle-earth, thousands of years before the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. "We feel like deep roots of this show are in the books and in Tolkien," co-showrunner Patrick McKay told the Television Critic Association, "we feel that this story isn't ours. It's a story we're stewarding that was here before us and was waiting in those books to be on Earth." With a large ensemble cast that includes Morfydd Clark (Saint Maud) and Robert Aramayo (Game of Thrones) as elves Galadriel and Elrond and Sir Lenny Henry as Sadoc Burrows, all eyes will be on whether the show – reported to have cost in the hundreds of millions of dollars – will stick the landing, as fans of this treasured franchise are known to be very discerning. Watch the trailer for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power here.
By Sue Torres2 years ago in Geeks
The Son review: 'A flawed film with a kind heart'
What does it mean to be a good father? It's a question many who find themselves responsible for caring for a child will ask themselves at one point or another. Is it a case of not repeating the same mistakes as your own parents? Is it about listening to and believing in your child when they're at their most emotionally vulnerable? Or is it obeying what authority figures say is best, even if you risk feeling cruel for siding with a stranger over your own flesh and blood? Parenthood – with all its various obstacles that require careful moral unknotting – is the subject of Florian Zeller's The Son, a well-meaning but hokey drama based on his own stage play Le Fils.
By Sue Torres2 years ago in Geeks
Film review: At Eternity’s Gate
There may never have been a painter as sure of his artistic vision, yet as emotionally needy, psychologically troubled and socially isolated as Vincent van Gogh. Willem Dafoe’s magnificent performance captures every bit of the artist’s complexity in Julian Schnabel’s At Eternity’s Gate. With stunning visuals and a judicious balance of poetry and drama, Schnabel draws us into both Van Gogh’s genius and his tortured life.
By Sue Torres2 years ago in Geeks
White Noise is 'thrillingly original'
t seems like no time at all since Adam Driver was playing the embodiment of cocky youth in Noah Baumbach's While We're Young (2014). But one of the great things about Baumbach's films is that as he gets older, his angst-ridden characters get older, too: with each new project he shines a light on the worries of another age bracket. In his brutal 2019 divorce drama, Marriage Story, Driver played a director who wasn't a hip young flavour-of-the-month any more. And now, in Baumbach's latest brilliant comedy, which opened the Venice Film Festival, Driver is middle-age incarnate: a university professor with thinning hair, a thickening waistband, and a looming awareness that he might be closer to death than birth. The role suits him so beautifully that awards nominations should be heading his way.
By Sue Torres2 years ago in Geeks
Film review: Mary Poppins Returns
How do you make a sequel to one of the most beloved live-action children’s films ever? For several decades, the answer was: you don’t. Mary Poppins was released in 1964, but even though the source novel’s author PL Travers wrote seven further books about the Banks family’s magical nanny, no one attempted to follow a film that was, to use Mary’s own phrase, practically perfect in every way.
By Sue Torres2 years ago in Geeks
Film review: Vice
Adam McKay made his name by directing Anchorman, Step Brothers, and other comedies in which Will Ferrell swears loudly and damages things, but he has since become one of the US’s most serious film-makers. Not serious in the sense of being ponderous or obscure, I hasten to add, but serious in his engagement with complex current affairs. The big change came with 2015’s The Big Short, an Oscar-winning docudrama which attempted to explain the machinations behind the 2007-2008 financial crisis, while attempting to get some laughs. McKay’s follow-up is Vice, a film which asks how US politics reached today’s surreal state. Its two-word answer: Dick Cheney.
By Sue Torres2 years ago in Geeks
Does The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part match the original?
Perhaps no sequel could ever have reached the giddy heights attained by The Lego Movie. Written and directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the best cartoon of 2014 was such a magnificently animated and dazzlingly inventive delight that there was probably only one way its follow-up could go. But it is still depressing to see The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part falling so far short of its glorious predecessor.
By Sue Torres2 years ago in Geeks
Mrs Harris Goes to Paris: The fairy-tale myth that endures
In Paul Gallico's 1958 novel Flowers for Mrs Harris, there is a couture dress called Temptation. It is black velvet: the long skirt covered in jet beads, the b odice a pale froth of chiffon, tulle and lace. It is number 89 in a show held within the hallowed halls of the House of Dior. Among the usual attendees – "ladies and honourables from England… baronesses from Germany, principessas from Italy, new-rich wives of French industrialists, veteran-rich wives of South American millionaires, buyers from New York" – there sits a London cleaner, enthralled by every emerging look. It is Temptation, though, that steals her heart. "She was lost, dazzled, blinded, overwhelmed by the beauty of the creation. This was IT!!"
By Sue Torres2 years ago in Geeks
Lords of Chaos: The grisly film that has caused outrage
Jonas Akerlund’s new film, Lords of Chaos, is a rock’n’roll biopic, with all the wigs and gigs that that implies. But it is also a grisly, stranger-than-fiction comedy drama about murder, suicide, self-harm, devil worship, and a spate of arson attacks that scandalised a nation. Chronicling the outrageous crimes committed by a few Norwegian black metal bands and their hangers-on in the early 1990s, the film probably won’t appeal to lovers of Bohemian Rhapsody – and there have even been calls from some church groups for the film to be banned.
By Sue Torres2 years ago in Geeks
Film review: Captain Marvel
A slow-motion explosion in a barren landscape sends Brie Larson flying to the ground, blue blood running from her nose. There’s a glimpse of Annette Bening holding a gun. Larson’s character, who has not yet become Captain Marvel, wakes from this memory in the form of a dream, but her real life is even stranger. She actually has an inner glow, bright light shining out from her hands. That opening sets up the film’s otherworldliness, its personal mystery – what is happening in that memory? – and above all, its action.
By Sue Torres2 years ago in Geeks
Hollywood’s new kind of love story
A quiet revolution took place in cinemas earlier this year with the release of Captain Marvel. As the Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise’s first female-fronted superhero movie, it wasn’t just what the film had that made it different, but also what it was lacking – a traditional romantic storyline.
By Sue Torres2 years ago in Geeks
Why cinemas will bounce back from the Coronavirus
Theatres are closing around the world. Jobs are being culled. No one knows when projectors will be fired up again. Cinema is far from unique in being an industry under threat in the time of Covid-19. But there is a particular irony in the fact that many of us have turned to streaming platforms to deliver entertainment to fill the long hours of isolation, often watching content originally made for the silver screen. Audiences have increasingly been consuming more films at home anyway, of course. But now that trend has become a fact of life, many are questioning whether the culture of cinemagoing will resume in the same way once the pandemic abates.
By Sue Torres2 years ago in Geeks