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Dramatisation of the whistleblowing & prosecution of GCHQ translator Katharine Gun who leaked a US communique to GCHQ instructing them to falsify a case for going to war in Iraq in 2003. Decent performances albeit seemingly heavyhanded dramatisation in places, leading one to wonder how much licence was taken and whether in real life the…
The Miss World pageant in 1970 was a groundbreaking focal point for womens’ rights & equality, conflating a simultaneous uprising of the Womens’ Liberation movement with the pageant’s recognition of non-white contestants, all against a depressingly sexist cultural backdrop which while easy to imagine possible, was pretty unsettling. Reasonably told if somewhat prone to caricature,…
The combination of Dwayne Johnson, the phrase “based on a true story”, and an IMDB rating of 6.4 probably best convey what this tale of a construction company owner going undercover to free his wrongfully imprisoned son is going to deliver. Severely fails the “Yeah, but you wouldn’t, would you?” test.
BASED ON A TRUE STORY tale of strippers who band together to fleece Wall Street types, in which nobody comes off particularly well. I think I was fine with it when it was just the strippers taking advantage of the city boys “conventionally”, but when they pivoted to their “business idea” & brought in other…
Victorian tale of balloonists pushing the boundaries of science & learning a lot about life and each other suspended in a tiny basket tens of thousands of feet above London. PROPERLY gave me the willies, if only due to the lack of safety equipment.
Dramatisation of entertainment playboy & lightweight David Frost’s campaign to bring attention to himself for interviewing disgraced former President, Richard Nixon – majestically performed by Michael Sheen and Frank Langella. Wonderful piece of cinema, in that the performances capture the building and changing of the relationship between the two men, and the complexity of the…
Excellent portrayal of one side of the Megyn Kelly / Gretchen Carlson / Roger Ailes / Fox News situation, which we’d become familiar with through The Loudest Voice. As with any biopic dramas like this, it’s necessarily a point of view on a telling of an event, but it was superbly acted and really great…
Occasionally paging through film descriptions on a streaming service one will pop up which you’d never have pictured yourself as being interested in or even having heard about, but seems like it’d make an interesting watch – and this was the case with this Daniel Radcliffe film about an FBI agent sent to work undercover…
The key phrase of the films I watched in 2019 seems to be “based on a true story”. In this case, a Mossad operation to evacuate Ethiopian Jews from Sudan by setting up a cover operation of a holiday resort. The whole thing had a very “Argo” feel about it to me, and as such…
I remember THIS one! You’ve got to love any story about WWE wrestling whose promotional spiel includes the sentence “Based on a true story”. And it’s got Nick Frost & Lena Headey playing a husband & wife. AND The Rock is in it. AND it’s written/directed by Stephen Merchant. AND the official genre description is…