Friday Mar 18 to Thursday Mar 24, 2016

“Ethan Hawke makes a riveting Chet Baker in this free-flowing bio

"It's 16 years since Maggie Smith last played cantankerous Mary Shepherd in Alan Bennett’s hit play about his real-life nuisance neighbour. Since then the veteran actress has carefully honed the art of the acidic one-liner in Downton Abbey and two 'Marigold Hotel' films.

“At the start of this brilliant, brutal adaptation, Michael Fassbender’s Macbeth lays oyster shells over the eyes of his dead son: an eerie funeral rite before the tiny body is burned on a pyre. Traditionally, the Macbeths have been portrayed as power-hungry. Cutting loose the play’s baggage, Australian director Justin Kurzel recasts them as damaged.

"Spotlight is a masterpiece. Director Tom McCarthy’s drama embraces both great cinema and even better journalism as it chronicles a Boston Globe investigative team’s real-life expose on child abuse by local priests and the Catholic Church cover-up that followed. Not only is it an amazingly crafted movie, it’s an important one as well.

"The Lacey women, wrote Irish novelist Colm Toibin in his 2009 book BROOKLYN, could do everything, 'except say out loud what it was they were thinking.' In John Crowley’s lovely film made from the novel, Saoirse Ronan ('Atonement') provides a master class in showing, not saying, what her character Eilis Lacey is thinking.

"Eddie Redmayne goes deep in this biopic on the Danish painter who became a transgender activist.Nearly a century ago, Einar Wegener became a pioneer in gender-reassignment surgery. You can't take your eyes off Eddie Redmayne (Oscar winner - The Theory of Everything), who is flat-out fabulous as Einar.

“Thank heavens he ends on an upbeat note! Well, semi-upbeat. For 73 minutes, Noam Chomsky, one of the great intellectuals of the past hundred years, describes how America was founded with a mandate to “protect the minority of the opulent against the majority,” and how it’s only got worse since then.