Because Everybody Else Has One

Doctor Strange is Marvel's most visually arresting movie to date but is it any more than that? Does it need to be? This review is also up at Channel 24 What it's about When Stephen Strange, an arrogant but brilliant neurosurgeon, has his life and career brought to a screeching halt after having his hands mangled in a bad car accident, his search for a cure brings him to the doorstep of the Ancient One, an ageless sorceress who may be the one person able to do what the most advanced medicine could not. What starts off as a desperate last resort for a man who has always lived his life with no time for anything beyond a materialistic (in both senses of the word) view of the world is soon confronted with both a reality that challenges everything he knows to be true and something that may well give him a purpose far, far greater and far more selfless than just healing his hand. What we thought Created by Steve Ditko and Stan Lee in 1963, Doctor Strange wasn't ...

A for Average. And, um, ignore the byline, the review up at Channel 24 is actually by me, not Gabi.  What's it about After a cataclysmic event wipes out humanity, a young woman and two men try to pick up the pieces of a fallen world as the last known survivors. It's not long, however, before tensions mount and complicated romances build. What we thought Named after the last of the prophets of the Hebrew Bible, Z for Zachariah is an intriguing mix of religion, romance and visions of humanity's end, played out first as an uneasy domestic drama before turning into a PG-13 psycho-sexual thriller. It would be nice to say that it all works but, sadly, for all of its ambitions, it never really comes together. I haven't read the Robert O'Brien novel on which it is based, but it does seem like the chief flaw of the film is that it makes a rather strange departure from its source in what must be some sort of bid for fans of YA dystopian fiction and...

I may, as always, have some catching up to do but there was no way that I wasn't going to give at least a quick look into one of the past year's best and most important films. Giving my highest of highest recommendations to Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave may come with the caveat that it is a truly grueling, almost physically difficult film to sit through, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't earn every one of those ten stars and it certainly doesn't mean that you shouldn't race out to see it - just be prepared for a cinematic experience that is anything but fun. In the same way that Schindler's List was far from the first film to deal with the Holocaust but has gone down as the one Holocaust film that everyone needs  to see, 12 Years a Slave will very possibly go down as the quintessential American slavery film. Also, like Schindler's List, this astonishingly true tale of Solomon Northop (played here with understated, mesmeric brilliance by...