Tag Archives: Jessica Chastain

Zero Dark Thirty review

Directed by Kathryn Bigelow Written by Mark Boal In the opening scenes of Zero Dark Thirty, following the text that the film is "based on first-hand accounts of actual events," Jason Clarke's CIA agent, the single-named Dan, is interrogating a prisoner at some Black Site, an American ops location without an address, somewhere in Pakistan. They're… Read More

Lawless review

Directed by John HillcoatWritten by Nick Cave from the Matt Bondurant book The Wettest County in the WorldIf you enjoyed the gritty Australian western The Proposition, also conjured by antipodean twosome Hillcoat and Cave, you'll find a similar blood-splattered tonality here, their adaptation of Bondurant's tale of his grandfather and two great-uncles' exploits as moonshiners… Read More

The Tree of Life podcast

Having a look back at my summer movie reviews, I'm amazed that I didn't sit down here to ramble on about The Tree of Life. I mean, there's no doubt the film will feature prominently in my Best of 2011 list, while at the same time I recognize it can be a frustratingly opaque cinematic… Read More

The Debt review

Directed by John MaddenWritten by Matthew Vaughn, Jane Goldman and Peter Straughan,based on the film Ha-Hov by Assaf Bernstein and Ido RosenblumRachel Singer (Helen Mirren), ex-husband Stephan Gold (Tom Wilkinson) and ex-pat David Peretz (Ciaran Hinds) are national heroes in their homeland of Israel. In the mid-1960s they were Mossad agents, assigned to East Berlin… Read More