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Artistic, musical, creative, and entertaining topics of art about all things geek.

Toronto International Film Festival review: The Goldfinch
“I don’t have to tell you about loss,” Nicole Kidman says softly to Ansel Elgort, whose character’s mother died years before, when a bomb exploded at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. We are well into The Goldfinch by then, but Kidman’s controlled, elegiac manner captures the tone that dominates throughout. John Crowley’s adaptation of Donna Tartt’s novel is beautifully photographed and eloquently told, but too emotionally muted for its own good.
By Many A-Sun3 years ago in Geeks
Film review: Downton Abbey
If you’re going to elevate the social world of Downton Abbey’s aristocratic Crawley family, you really have nowhere to go but up to the king and queen. As this cheerful movie picks up from the hugely popular television series, King George V and Queen Mary visit Downton. It is 1927, soon after the show’s story ended. There is no mention of the royal guests’ then-baby granddaughter, who would grow up to be Elizabeth II.
By Alessandro Algardi3 years ago in Geeks
TIFF review: A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood
nyone even slightly aware of who Fred Rogers was – the soft-spoken, beloved host of Mister Rogers’ Neighbourhood, the children’s television program that taught values like kindness and forgiveness – can understand the response of Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys), a hard-nosed reporter assigned to interview him. “The hokey kid show guy?” he asks, incredulous and insulted. His reaction is a perfect expression of the dread some of us brought to the idea of a film about Mr Rogers, a fear enhanced by what seemed the too-neat casting of Tom Hanks in the lead, one impossibly good guy playing another. But Marielle Heller’s wise, sophisticated A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood turns out to be something rare – a warm-hearted film that even cynics can love.
By Mao Jiao Li3 years ago in Geeks
Can cinema still shock?
At this year’s Venice Film Festival, there was no bigger talking point than The Painted Bird. The new film by Czech director Václav Marhoul is a black-and-white adaptation of the 1965 novel by Polish-American novelist Jerzy Kosiński, which describes World War Two from the perspective of a young Jewish boy on a journey through the horrors of Nazi-occupied Europe. Its press and industry screening inspired walkouts on three separate occasions, ensuring the film a certain period of notoriety. This was followed up by further walkouts a week later during its North American premiere at the Toronto Film Festival.
By Monu Ella3 years ago in Geeks
For Sama and the female perspective on war
“Everything we know about war we know with ‘a man’s voice’. We are all captives of ‘men’s’ notions and ‘men’s’ sense of war. ‘Men’s’ words. Women are silent.” So writes the Nobel prize- winning journalist Svetlana Alexievich in the introduction to her celebrated book The Unwomanly Face of War.
By Many A-Sun3 years ago in Geeks
Film review: Ad Astra
his article was originally published on 30 August 2019, when Ad Astra premiered at the Venice Film Festival. The Venice Film Festival has launched three of Hollywood’s most thoughtful space-travel movies recently, with last year’s First Man following Arrival and Gravity. This year, it’s the turn of Ad Astra, written and directed by James Gray, and starring Brad Pitt as Major Roy McBride, astronaut extraordinaire. Ad Astra is almost as intelligent as those other films, but it shares too much of their imagery to seem entirely original. And, like them, it veers towards questions of parenthood and loss, a trajectory that is starting to become irritating. Isn’t anyone allowed to journey to the final frontier without getting choked up about their relatives along the way?
By Alessandro Algardi3 years ago in Geeks
Why is Judy Garland the ultimate gay icon?
On 25 March, 1969, Judy Garland took to the stage at the Falkoner Center in Copenhagen. As she reached the crescendo of Over the Rainbow – the song which made her a global star aged just 17 – it was unknown to the audience that they were watching her final live performance. Four months later, 47 year-old Garland was found dead in Chelsea, London, after accidentally overdosing on the drugs she had self-medicated with since childhood. One of the headlines would read: “Judy’s voice stilled. The rainbow is gone.”
By Mao Jiao Li3 years ago in Geeks
Abdus Salam: The Muslim science genius forgotten by history
In 1979, Pakistani scientist Abdus Salam won the Nobel Prize for physics. His life’s work was key to defining a theory of particle physics still used today, and it laid the groundwork for the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson – the particle responsible for giving all other particles mass.
By Many A-Sun3 years ago in Geeks
Film review: Maleficent: Mistress of Evil
She’s bad, she’s good, she’s bad again. It’s hard to keep up with Maleficent, but one thing is certain: when making plans to meet the future in-laws, no one wants to hear, “Maleficent is coming to dinner”. That is an actual line of dialogue from Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, a vibrant if scattershot sequel to the 2014 hit. As a character piece, the sequel short-changes Angelina Jolie’s heroine/anti-heroine, of the glaring green contact lenses, black horns on her head and ultra-sharp prosthetic cheekbones. But as a fairy-tale action film, it is more colourful, energetic and absorbing than the first Maleficent.
By Alessandro Algardi3 years ago in Geeks
Doctor Sleep review: A ‘horror-tinged superhero movie’
Not many people will have come away from Stanley Kubrick’s classic Stephen King adaptation, The Shining, with a burning desire to know what happened to the boy in the story. He was one of the film’s least engaging characters, ranking somewhere between the ghostly twins and the withered hag in the bathtub. But Doctor Sleep, a belated sequel to The Shining, wants viewers to care about the boy’s fate – and, surprisingly, it succeeds. Credible in its characterisation, rich in mythological detail, and touchingly sincere in its treatment of alcoholism and trauma, the film is impressive in all sorts of ways. But its greatest achievement is that it makes The Shining seem like a prequel – a tantalising glimpse of a richer and more substantial narrative.
By Mao Jiao Li3 years ago in Geeks
Rewatching old films like Brief Encounter or Star Wars
In this era of peak content, we don’t have to look far to find something new to watch. Not only are more new films being released than ever before, but streaming means we can choose from thousands of movies without even leaving our sofa. You could watch something different every night and still barely make a dent in the sheer volume of entertainment on offer. So why do so many of us choose to watch films we’ve already seen – once, twice or a dozen times before? When Back To The Future appears in the TV schedule, why do we sit through it for the 43rd time, already knowing every line of the script?
By Monu Ella3 years ago in Geeks
Terminator Dark Fate review: Please terminate this franchise
Well, he did say he’d be back. Arnold Schwarzenegger made that promise in The Terminator in 1984, little realising that “I’ll be back” would become his most famous line of dialogue, or that the homicidal cyborg he was playing would become his defining role. True to his word, he was back for Terminator 2: Judgment Day in 1991, along with the original film’s writer-director, James Cameron, and its co-star, Linda Hamilton. After that, Schwarzenegger was back for Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines in 2003, Terminator Salvation in 2009, and Terminator Genisys in 2015, but they wandered further and further from the lean, mean high-concept thrills of the 1984 classic. And now he is back again in Terminator Dark Fate.
By Many A-Sun3 years ago in Geeks