OK, so I’m jumping ahead of myself somewhat, but I’m back in Serbia for a couple of weeks of hoopla, including the first days of filming of Ralph Fiennes directorial debut Coriolanus.

Set in the early years of the Roman Republic, Coriolanus is one of Shakespeare’s most politically challenging examinations of the way power corrupts. Quite [...]

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Body of Lies is a strange film that’s handicapped to a degree by the fact that its two towering leads – diCaprio and Crowe – conduct most of their interactions telephonically.

DiCaprio plays Roger Ferris, a CIA operative in Iraq who’s distinguished from his fellow countrymen by actually liking the Middle East and Middle Easterners generally. [...]

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Silence on the film-watching front, mainly because I’ve been flat out on developing a Media and Legacy Centre for Africa’s biggest visitor drawcard – the V&A Waterfront in Cape Town.

Just a hop and a skip from the brand new Cape Town Stadium, the media centre will be offering a one-stop shop for premium media services, [...]

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I don’t know why I do it to myself. I only watched the Hollywood remake of Bangkok Dangerous because we’re planning a trip to Thailand later this year and I was curious. It meant of course trying to set aside my qualms about Nicholas Cage, and sitting back to enjoy a panoply of exotic locations, [...]

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The Redhead will be pleased; we finally watched Grace Kelly’s last film, High Society on pvr last night, and he insisted I blogged on its locations today. And look what glorious gossip I found: one of the main locations, Clarendon Court in Rhode Island, was later the place where the heinous Claus von Bulow allegedly [...]

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The Mist, I’m pleased to report, is a fairly cracking little horror pic. Set in small town Maine (of course – it’s a Stephen King story) in the aftermath of a ferocious storm, the good townsfolk have hurried to the local store for supplies and repair materials. But across the lake, from the general direction [...]

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It doesn’t happen quite so much these days, but there was a time when you mentioned living in Africa and people thought there were giraffes in the street. I did live in Zimbabwe for a while and I remember startling a zebra once, when out on a morning run (the run being more unusual than [...]

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OK, I’m back in the saddle after a marvellously lazy Christmas break; the grand total of my efforts being 1. opening the wine (thank heavens for screwtops) 2. rolling to the pool 3. nope, that’s about it.
So since the spectacular Avatar, I’ve not seen any movies except a few Almodovar oldies on dvd – but [...]

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2012 is from Roland Emmerich, so you know it’s going to start with a lone scientist with his mouth open, staring at a flickering monitor going “Oh My God”. You also know there’ll be some quasi science and a bit of cultural history – here the link to the end of the Mayan calendar in [...]

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Steven Soderberg goes all Casablanca on us, with a black and white, forties-style film noir, The Good German. George Clooney plays Jake Geismar, a war correspondent in Potsdam, Germany, for the Post Armistice conference held by the victorious Allies. It starts as a murder mystery, when his venal, vicious snotrag of a driver is pulled [...]

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