Reviews written by Fiona Ingram
Gladiator (2000) is a Ridley Scott film with a star-studded cast. The Roman general Maximus Decimus Meridius is betrayed when Commodus, the ambitious son of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, murders his father and seizes the throne. Barely escaping death, and witness to the destruction of his property and the murder...
Rampage is a creature feature starring Dwayne Johnson, Naomie Harris, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, and a plethora of (not real) animals. Primatologist Davis Okoye teams up with a disgraced scientist/genetic engineer Doctor Kate Caldwell when animals are exposed to a pathogen that causes mutations. The pathogen that was secretly being...
Faster is an action thriller movie starring Dwayne Johnson, Billy Bob Thornton, Moon Bloodgood, Tom Berenger, and Carla Gugino. When Jimmy Cullen leaves prison after serving his time for armed robbery, he locates three things: his 1970 Chevrolet Chevelle, a gun, and a list of names. The people involved...
San Andreas is a 2015 American disaster/thriller movie starring Dwayne Johnson, Carla Gugino, Ioan Gruffudd, Alexandra Daddario, Archie Panjabi, and Paul Giamatti. A massive earthquake caused by the San Andreas fault devastates the West Coast of the US. The movie tracks the efforts of Ray Gaines, a rescue helicopter...
The book. War Horse is a literary, film and theatrical experience that no one should miss. War Horse began as a children’s novel by award-winning author Michael Morpurgo. It was first published in Great Britain in 1982, set before and during the First World War. This powerful story recounts...
This movie is like candy floss (aka cotton candy) - lots of pink, fluffy stuff, odiously sweet and totally lacking in substance. I don't know why Angelina Jolie is in the movie because either she can't act, or she did not feel like acting, or she did not think...
The Hobbit is the first step on Tolkien’s long journey into Middle-earth. The story is set in Middle-earth sixty years before The Lord of the Rings, and portions of the film are adapted from the appendices to Tolkien's The Return of the King novel. An Unexpected Journey tells of...
Visually compelling but short on lots of story elements. I’ve just watched Snow White and the Huntsman and I emerged from the cocoon of the movie theatre a mite confused. Was it an action movie? A love story that didn’t get off the ground? Why were the characters so...
Books to film: do they work? In the case of Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, yes. I chose to watch this film because the title alone is ridiculous. You can’t fish for salmon in the Yemen, or can you? I also liked the combination of Blunt and McGregor as...
The megalodon is back. With friends. Lots of friends as well as some who have no business being able to walk on land! Quick recap: Jonas Taylor (our Jason) and crew descend again into the Trench (the Mariana Trench) to investigate further and do more research. They...
The megalodon is back. With friends. Lots of friends as well as some who have no business being able to walk on land! Quick recap: Jonas Taylor (our Jason) and crew descend again into the Trench (the Mariana Trench) to investigate further and do more research. They...
I first saw the stage production of Les Misérables when I was a drama student in London. I cried from start to finish. I recently saw the movie version. I cried from start to finish. What is it about this powerful book, written in 1862—meaning it’s over...
I just watched the new Ridley Scott film Prometheus. Is it good? It’s great. But is it good? No, not really, if you’re interested in the story, the fact that it’s the prequel to the wildly successful Alien franchise, and if you’re a stickler for tying up loose ends. If...
On Christmas Day, in keeping with the theme, I decided that the movie du jour should be The Man Who Invented Christmas. This star-studded cast boasts some acting greats such as Christopher Plummer, Ian McNeice, Simon Callow, Donald Sumpter, Jonathan Pryce, Bill Paterson, and Miriam Margolyes. The story this...
“Federal Agent Aaron Falk returns to his hometown Kiewarra after an absence of over twenty years to attend the funeral of his childhood friend, Luke, who allegedly killed his wife Karen and child Billy (sparing baby daughter Charlotte) before taking his own life. Luke's parents persuade a reluctant Falk...
I was a little disappointed with the quality of production, being used to the usual high-quality Christie fare. The plot of Agatha and the Curse of Ishtar was disjointed and choppy and the whole premise was not very well outlined. I also found Lyndsey Marshall a bland and not...
Moving on to Glass Onion, which I watched last night. Why, one might ask, would I bother since Craig’s performance was so hammy and abysmal? Because I thought he would drop his dreadful Southern accent (whose very bad idea was that?) or at least make an effort to improve....
In Knives Out, the first Benoit Blanc murder mystery, Harlan Thrombey, a well-known crime novelist is found dead after his 85th birthday. His throat had been slashed. Could it have been suicide? Can people even slash their own throats??? Top detective Benoit Blanc is called in to solve the...
While I am not usually a horror fan, something about The Cave piqued my interest. “In the 13th-century Carpathian Mountains of Romania, an Eastern Orthodox abbey and its inhabitants are destroyed by a landslide. Centuries later, a group of modern-day Soviet and British plunderers search for the long-lost abbey...
“An explosion at a mine in Manitoba traps 26 miners. Mike McCann and his brother Gurty, an Iraq War veteran suffering from PTSD and aphasia, work for a trucking company until Mike punches another trucker for referring to Gurty as a "retard", and they are both fired. Mike hears...
I’m a big fan of Jane Austen’s novels and their various adaptations. I loved the 1996 adaptation of Emma with Gwyneth Paltrow and Jeremy Northam. It had sparkle, panache, simmering flirtation, and real heart. Sadly, the 2020 production of Emma is all style and no substance. The good parts:...
A Castle for Christmas follows the path of rich and famous romance author Sophie Brown who flees the wrath of her irate fans, after she killed off the hero of her best-selling series, to Scotland, where her father grew up. Particularly at a place called Dun Dunbar which is,...
In Mrs Harris Goes to Paris, a movie based on the 1958 novel by Paul Gallico, Ada Harris, a British cleaning lady, manages to scrape together enough money to travel to Paris to buy a dream Dior gown. Despite the initial rebuffs by some at the French fashion house,...
Blithe Spirit, based on the 1941 play by Noel Coward, is about a writer, Charles Condomine (played by a lacklustre and hammy Dan Stevens), who gets a fake medium, Madame Arcati (superbly performed by the inimitable Judi Dench), to hold a séance at his house. Although a successful writer,...
Twisters 2 is billed as a stand-alone sequel to the 1996 Twister. The main lead, Kate Carter, loses 3 of her friends tragically in a tornado-chasing experiment that went spectacularly wrong. She gives up her ambitions and goes to work at a NOAA office in New York....
