Archive
A HAUNTING IN VENICE – Hildur Guðnadóttir
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
A Haunting in Venice is the third adaptation of an Agatha Christie novel by director Kenneth Branagh, after Murder on the Orient Express in 2017, and Death on the Nile in 2022. It’s also, by quite some significant margin, the worst. It’s very loosely based on Christie’s 1969 work Halloween Party and sees the Belgian master detective Hercule Poirot living in semi-retirement in Venice, when he is convinced to attend a Halloween party by his old friend novelist Ariadne Oliver; also at this party will be a supposed psychic medium, Joyce Reynolds, and Ariadne wants Poirot to help her unmask Reynolds as a fraud. However, as the night unfolds, Poirot gets drawn into a sinister plot involving murder, hidden family secrets, and a supposed curse of ghostly children haunting the palazzo where the séance takes place. The film stars Kenneth Branagh as Poirot, Tina Fey as Oliver, and Michelle Yeoh as Reynolds, plus Kelly Reilly, Jamie Dornan, Jude Hill, and Camille Cottin in supporting roles. Read more…
JOKER – Hildur Guðnadóttir
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
In this era where super hero movies are a dime a dozen, where in the past 30 years we’ve had at least three Supermen, five Batmen, three Spider-Men, and innumerable iterations of other DC and Marvel comic book characters, it was only a matter of time before someone tried to do something completely out-of-the-box different. While the majority of these films concentrate on the heroes, perhaps the most iconic villain in all of comic book history is the Joker, the long-standing nemesis of Batman. He has been portrayed on film multiple times himself; by Cesar Romero in 1966, by Jack Nicholson in 1989, by Heath Ledger in 2008, and by Jared Leto most recently in 2016, with Ledger’s Oscar-winning performance in The Dark Knight coming to be considered the gold standard. There have been multiple origin stories for the character, but he has never been the sole focus of a film before – until now. Read more…
CHERNOBYL – Hildur Guðnadóttir
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
On April 26, 1986, the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, close to the Ukraine-Belarus border in what was then the Soviet Union, suffered a catastrophic accident in which one of the plant’s four nuclear reactor cores exploded. The explosion started a fire and released massive amounts of nuclear radiation into the atmosphere and across most of Eastern Europe; it entirely irradiated the nearby city of Pripyat and, although official totals are much lower, may have directly and indirectly lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. The new mini-series Chernobyl, produced jointly by HBO in the United States and Sky in the UK, is a detailed look at what happened: the events leading up to the disaster, the work of the emergency services in the immediate aftermath, the work of the scientists tasked with finding out what happened, and the fates of those directly affected. Many people have taken Chernobyl to be a cautionary tale about the dangers of nuclear power, but director Johan Renck and screenwriter Craig Mazin say that is not what the show is about at all. Instead, it’s supposed to be a damning indictment of government corruption, lies, and abuse of power, with parallels echoing the current situation involving global warming and climate change. Read more…
MARY MAGDALENE – Hildur Guðnadóttir and Jóhann Jóhannsson
Original Review by Anže Grčar
The unfortunate and unexpected passing of Jóhann Jóhannsson in early February, sent shockwaves through the film community, and lovers of modernist music at large. Not only was he flourishing and enjoying a fruitful career highlight since the indie world took his scores for mainly Denis Villeneuve-helmed films to the heart, but the death of any person at barely 48 years of age is a sad reminder of how fragile our existence can be. Jóhannsson is leaving behind a stunning body of work, ranging from independent studio albums in his native Iceland, that gained a loyal following due to their experimental sonic blends of traditional orchestration with contemporary electronic elements, to his recent film scores, which exposed so many traditional scoring aficionados to variety of post-modernist styles – all coming from an artist who always managed to encapsulate life from a different, more introverted angle that was singular only to him. Read more…
Shop at the Movie Music UK Store
Member of the
MOVIE MUSIC UK 