Eddie the Eagle
This movie about how a little boy with big ambitions became Eddie the Eagle may be light fare but it is also admirably successful in what it aims to be: an underdog-comes-out-on-top feel-good movie.
Eddie (Taron Egerton) has had a dream from a very young age: to compete in the Olympics. It took him decades of hard work to get there. You might expect that hard work to be about someone becoming a world class athlete at their chosen sport – but no that’s not Eddie. He’s not really an athlete at all, and he isn’t committed to a specific sport to shine in either – yet he will achieve his Olympic Dreams.
Spotlight
‘Spotlight’ is the section of the Boston Globe’s paper that looks beyond and delves deeper – work done by the paper’s investigative journalism team led by Robby Robertson (Michael Keaton). In 2001, the newspaper gets a new Chief Editor Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber). Marty suggests the Spotlight team take a closer look at priest Geoghan, as there have been various stories about accusations against him.
Hunger
Hunger chronicles the last months of Bobby Sands. Sands (Michael Fassbender) was an IRA member, imprisoned in the Maze prison in the early 1980s. The IRA prisoners, amonst others, refused to wear the standard issue prison clothes as they insisted their terrorist acts weren’t criminal but politically driven, and hence they demanded ‘political status’ in prison. Thatcher refused.
Experimenter
Even if not by name, most people will have heard of the experiments this movie is about. Milgram was trying to understand how people respond to (perceived) authority and rules when they are given instructions that most people in ‘normal’ circumstances would generally be thought to obviously decline to carry out.
Dragon Blade
The most expensive Chinese movie ever made, Dragon Blade cannot be accused of lacking ambition. The intent of the story is grand and some of the battle scenes are grander still.
I went into this movie with an open mind hoping for some spectacle as the scale has awe-inspiring potential. But blimey did they mess this up. The angle to the whole story is incredibly sappy… amplified by a painfully melodramatic score to ‘highlight’ all the emotional bonding that is going on when enemies become allies and Jackie Chan continues to fight for the common good…