ALLAN HUNTER looks ahead to this year’s programme

ALLAN HUNTER at the Movies TRUE WIT has an ability to transcend time and distance. Noel Coward’s Easy Virtue was written over eighty years ago, but a new screen version reveals that it has lost none of its sparkle or charm. Director Stephan Elliott is best known for Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert, and approaches […]

ALLAN HUNTER at the Movies THE BEST of modern German cinema has explored the dramatic possibilities of a nation coming to terms with its past. The Lives Of Others and Downfall have been award-winning international success stories. The Baader Meinhof Complex continues that tradition by capturing the inner workings of the left-wing terrorist group the […]

ALLAN HUNTER at the Movies CASINO ROYALE took the James Bond franchise back to basics. Daniel Craig’s 007 was not the suave man of the world that we know and love. Instead, he was a raw, untried secret agent learning the demands of the job and the moral responsibilities that accompany it. Craig brought a […]

ALLAN HUNTER at the Movies QUIET CHAOS (Caos calmo) has all the ingredients of a typical tv-movie weepie. A sudden death leaves a middle-aged television executive alone to care for his young daughter and pick up the pieces of his life. It could easily be an afternoon matinee on Five. In the hands of Italian […]

ALLAN HUNTER at the Movies HOW DO you follow a film like No Country For Old Men? The Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, manage it effortlessly with their breathless screwball spy spoof Burn After Reading. A cast of A-list Oscar winners really let their hair down in a film that almost feels like a pantomime […]

ALLAN HUNTER at the Movies The Godfather and Goodfellas are just two of the landmark American films that have given us an insider’s view of the evils of organised crime. Gomorrah (or Gomorra in its original Italian version) goes one step further, constructing a compelling, journalistic account of the way the Mafia-style Camorra control and […]

ALLAN HUNTER at the Movies EVELYN WAUGH’s 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited is considered a classic of British literature. The 1981 television adaptation is a landmark of the medium. It takes a brave soul to decide that the world might welcome a brand new film version of this celebrated text. The 2008 adaptation looks a treat […]

ALLAN HUNTER at the Movies MORE THAN ten years after her Hollywood heyday, Kristin Scott Thomas is finding some of the best roles of her career on stage and screen. She gives a superlative, Oscar-worthy performance in I’ve Loved You So Long (Il y a Longtemps Que Je T’aime) a sombre, slow-burning drama that builds […]

ALLAN HUNTER at the Movies HOW EASILY could a dictatorship take hold in a democratic country? History teaches us that it happens all too frequently. The lesson is strikingly underlined by The Wave, a slick, involving German thriller partially inspired by true events. Rainer Wegner (Jurgen Vogel) is the kind of schoolteacher who feels more […]