REVIEW: The Duke [2022]

You’d like this one, love. It’s a wild story of a British “Robin Hood” stealing from the government in 1961 to hopefully (and earnestly) payback taxpayers who better deserved the funds set aside to stop a hostile takeover of ownership of Francisco Goya’s Portrait of the Duke of Wellington. Kempton Bunton (Jim Broadbent) had already gone on-record (and served jailtime) for his efforts to end the BBC license fee being charged poor pensioners who simply wanted a television to connect with the fast-growing world outside their doors. With no one…

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REVIEW: Becoming Jane [2007]

Are there no other women in Hampshire? I had never seen Julian Jarrold‘s Becoming Jane before today and yet my constantly being hit with a sense of familiarity while watching made me question that truth. The reason stems from the fact that screenwriters Kevin Hood and Sarah Williams crafted their tale of young Jane Austen fifteen years before her first novel (Sense and Sensibility) was published to unfold as though it was Pride and Prejudice. They’ve based this reading of Austen’s life on letters written to her sister Cassandra about…

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REVIEW: Philomena [2013]

“No one’s interested in Russian bloody history” The dreaded ‘human interest story’—a tale about naively ignorant folk read by naively ignorant folk. I paraphrase what wrongly disgraced journalist Martin Sixsmith (Steve Coogan) dryly quips when first told about the aging woman’s plight he would soon use to rejuvenate his career (at least where the film’s concerned considering he published The Lost Child of Philomena Lee eight years after his being ‘resigned’ from the BBC), but you get the point. Why would anyone who covered political scandals and wars want to…

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