Feast of Film

Looking out into the cold, dark, deep waters ahead, not knowing where and when the pack of wolves will come for him, his crew and their precious cargo. Tom Hanks is one of the few actors today who has the star power to achieve the feat of making this film - and having it bought for AppleTV+ to boot! See what I did there? I threw in a pun that relates to a classic WWII German submarine film - if you don't know it, then watch it. Greyhound attempts to show a singular experience in the Second World War that has not been as well documented in films of the past couple of decades.  We've seen them storming the beaches again via Saving Private Ryan , fighting on the Eastern Front via Enemy at the Gates , the horror of the Holocaust via Schindler's List and how not to make a movie about the pacific war in the execrable Pearl Harbor ( Midway helped salvage that somewhat).  Then, of course, there were Clint Eastwood's twin triumphs of Letters from Iwo Jima and Flag...

Dan Brown's much read (though not by me) book comes to the big screen . Big stars (Hanks, McKellen, Prochnow, Reno, Tautou); big name director (Howard) and screenwriter (Goldsman); controversey (the descedants of Jesus and the Catholic Church); big budget - how could anything go wrong? In a way, this could be seen as Hollywood's response to Mel Gibson's hugely successful Passion of the Christ . The secular Hollywood producers take on the devoutly religious Gibson with a 'bible' of their own. I'll leave that in the air for consideration, as the film itself is rather pedestrian and does make efforts to distance the Church itself from the actions of its constituent shadowy parts. The plot: Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) is a professor of religious symbolism currently in Paris to promote his book on the feminine representations in religion. Summoned to the Louvre to see the gruesome self-defaced corpse of a curator, Langdon joins forces with French cryptologist, Sophie...