Johann Koehler

Tom Hardy plays Ivan Locke, who steps from the construction site where he works into his BMW in the late evening as the film begins. This is the only time we will see Locke outside of his car for the duration of the film, and it is the only time we will see him in […]

Preparing for this semester’s batch of final exams means that I will not be making a new film recommendation this week. Instead, I’m going to flag up my review from some years ago of Alan Bennett’s collaboration with Nicholas Hytner in The History Boys, which is about what happens when a few Yorkshire lads go stir-crazy prepping […]

According to lawyers, there’s one film that consistently ranks among the top law-themed films of all time. It’s not hard to see why, when you have a rare narrative that portrays the lawyer as himself being the embattled underdog, who manages to overcome adversity and become the noble problem-solver and advocate for justice he was […]

This week’s movie recommendation doesn’t neatly qualify as a documentary — but then again, I struggle to call it anything else. Cutie and the Boxer, directed by Zachary Heinzerling, tells the story of the wedded Japanese avant-garde artists Ushio and Noriko Shinohara. The film intermittently departs from the traditional documentary format and veers toward something that more closely […]

After commercial success with Memento in 2000, Christopher Nolan moved on to remake a Norwegian film that would cement his place as one of the great high-concept thriller directors in showbiz. In 2002, he released this weekend’s movie recommendation: Insomnia. Al Pacino plays Detective Will Dormer, a legendary detective of the LAPD. Dormer and his […]

With the exception of a few choice gems, it’s commonplace that sequels don’t ‘live up’ to the legacy they inherit from the earlier film. In this weekend’s movie recommendation, I’d like to submit that Scorsese’s sequel to Robert Rossen’s The Hustler (reviewed here), in which Paul Newman reprises the role of ‘Fast’ Eddie Felson to […]

If you have to wait for further instructions, you might as well wait somewhere enjoyable. Bruges will do. Hitmen Ken and Ray just finished a job in London, and their boss Harry has told them to hide out in Belgium until he sends further word. The snag, however, is that although Ken (played by Brendan Gleeson) […]

The 2016 film recommendation season kicks off with the BBC’s wonderful televised adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies, in a six part series named after the first of the books. The story deals with some rather well-rehearsed material for English audiences. (The old saying is that the British school curriculum […]

Film adaptations of John Le Carré’s books have already enjoyed some praise here at the RBC (e.g., see Keith’s reviews of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy). In this weekend’s movie recommendation, we turn to another European spy caper in a more recent film from 2014, A Most Wanted […]

In this week’s movie recommendation, Clint Eastwood makes a delightful play on his earlier career persona. He trades the brooding, solitary gunslinger for a much more vulnerable and aged Secret Service bodyguard in Wolfgang Petersen’s In the Line of Fire. Eastwood plays Frank Horrigan, a man bedeviled by his legacy as “the only active agent […]