‘The tragedy of the Essex is the story of men. And a Demon.’

Ben Whishaw plays the author Herman Melville, who in the 1850s turns up at the home of Tom Nickerson (Brendan Gleeson), who reluctantly ends up recounting his whaling ship’s sinking by a giant whale when he was a lad back in 1820 in a true story that inspired Melville’s classic novel Moby Dick.

Tom Holland (the new Spider-Man) plays the young Nickerson undergoing terrible trials and tribulations aboard Captain George Pollard (Benjamin Walker) and First Mate Owen Chase (Chris Hemsworth)’s New England whaling ship Essex.

Director Ron Howard’s $100million period adventure movie is well polished but all at sea, bearing signs of heavy editing to its present crisp 123 minutes...

Director Peter Webber’s civilised 2003 drama stars Scarlett Johansson as the Dutch maid Griet who becomes the model for 17th-century artist Dutch master Johannes Vermeer (1632-75), played by Colin Firth.

Olivia Hetreed‘s literate screenplay for this highly imaginative, fanciful biopic is based on a novel by Tracy Chevalier, who carefully and intelligently develops her story from the little that is known about the painter. In the story, wealthy Van Ruijven, who is Vermeer’s sole means of support, commissions him to paint Griet, intending to have her for himself before the painting is finished. 

This beautifully played, exquisitely realised movie, with a gorgeous flavour of the times, is perhaps just a tiny a bit dull as drama...

Screenwriter/director William Boyd adapts his own novel for this 1999 First World War wartime film drama in which a platoon of young British soldiers bicker in a tiny 8ft-wide trench in the last 48 hours of the build-up to the 1916 disastrous Battle of the Somme.

When the order comes for them to join the first wave of attacks, they are of course unaware they will be there in battle when the British Army loses the greatest number of soldiers in a single day in history. The lads will have to depend on their Lieutenant and Sergeant for their survival.

As we have come to expect of British films, the performances are first rate, with the actors relishing Boyd’s dialogue...

Johnny Depp stars as Berkeley genius scientist Dr Will Caster who is on the verge of creating an omniscient, sentient A.I. machine. But a rogue anti-technology terrorist group fights to stop him and they put him out of action by radioactive poisoning.

As his body slowly deteriorates, his researcher wife Evelyn (Rebecca Hall) and his brilliant partner and best friend Max (Paul Bettany) work frantically to upload his mind to a computer to allow him to continue his research. Morgan Freeman plays a government-supported scientist and Cillian Murphy is FBI Agent Buchanan on the case.

Slack pacing, unexciting camerawork, dull locations, moderate visual effects and the uncertain screen-writing in first-time-writer Jack Paglen’s screenplay are the main problems in this ambitious and intriguing d...

Romance and violence are the main stands of director John Crowley’s intriguing 2003 patchwork of Irish life, which unravels as the lives of a bunch of losers intersect in Dublin.

Colin Farrell stars as a petty thug who hits a shop assistant for a few Euros, and Cillian Murphy plays a store clerk involved in kidnap and theft when his girlfriend Kelly Macdonald dumps him.

With hard, dedicated work from Farrell, Murphy, Macdonald, Shirley Henderson as Sally and Colm Meaney as a shady cop, the good acting brings InterMission to life. And yet screenwriter Mark O’Rowe’s intriguingly devised film is as often dull as it is funny or dramatic.

Outstanding on the soundtrack are U2’s Out of Control, Clannad’s Newgrange, Gark Kemp’s True, The Magnetic Fields’ I Don’t Want to Get Over Yo...

The darkness falls over Gotham City and co-writer/director Christopher Nolan’s thrilling 2005 Batman/Dark Knight reboot is a triumph, and so is Christian Bale’s sombre Bruce Wayne/Batman, who is centre stage all the way as we discover the character’s previously unexplored origins and early days.

In David S Goyer’s beginnings story, young millionaire playboy Bruce Wayne’s parents are killed and he moves to Asia where he is mentored by expert manhunter and deadly killer from France Henri Ducard (Liam Neeson) and Ra’s Al Ghul (Ken Watanabe) in how to fight evil. Bruce comes up with ideas for his symbol, costume, gadgets, car and cave.

After a stay of seven years, Batman then heads home to begin his war on crime to free Gotham City from the  web of corruption that the Scarecrow (Cillian M...

‘Same world, different planet!’ In brave, bold turn, and looking pretty as a picture, Cillian Murphy is a fabulous knockout as an Irish boy called Patrick Braden, who wants to be a girl called Kitten and tries to live his life as one in the difficult Ireland of the Seventies.

He/she’s living in the same world as everyone else but, in Seventies Ireland, she’s on a different planet from them because her gender identity is beyond the town’s understanding. So, the young trans woman comes of age by leaving her Irish town for London, to look for her mother and find like-minded folk.

This excellent, edgy, quirky feel-good 2005 film comes from the imaginative, challenging director of Mona Lisa, (1984) The Crying Game (1992) and Interview with the Vampire (1994).

The provocative, intelligen...