Tag: preacher

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Features Live Action Movies Music

Sinners

Director – Ryan Coogler – 2025 – US – Cert. 15 – 138m

*****

In 1932, a young blues guitarist finds himself out of his depth when two brothers open a juke joint which comes unexpectedly under siege from supernatural forces – out in UK cinemas on Friday, April 18th

It’s a strange thing, but Warner Bros., which has a reputation for tough guy movies from its hard-edged gangster movies of the 1930s, has never made a movie about the blues. If that seems something of a stretch as an assumption, humour me here. The blues came out of the hardships of the Afro-American experience – white racism and the slave trade, poverty and hardship, and there was something raw about it, much as with those early gangster movies that shaped the Studio’s identity.

The idea of Warner Bros. making a movie about the black experience and the blues (or, indeed, building an entire genre around that idea) seems so obvious that it’s a wonder the Studio never did it before. Perhaps it’s significant that Warner Bros. were the Studio that made Elvis (Baz Luhrmann, 2023), which touches on such material.

Warner Bros. also has the first talking picture, The Jazz Singer (Alan Crosland, 1927), hardwired into its DNA.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Firebrand

Director – Karim Ainouz – 2023 – UK – Cert. 15 – 121m

*****

Henry VIII’s sixth wife Katherine Parr must navigate the increasingly treacherous waters between her desire for religious tolerance and Henry’s more authoritarian take on Christianity – out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 6th

With her husband Henry VIII away fighting wars abroad, the Queen – Henry’s sixth wife Katherine Parr (Alicia Vikander) – has been declared Regent. Yet, for all the power, at least temporarily, entrusted to her, she cannot go anywhere outside the castle without male guards. On the pretext of visiting a religious shrine to which only women can be admitted, she (and her loyal ladies in waiting) slip off to a forest glade where her old friend Anne Askew (Erin Doherty) is preaching on the fact that the Bible has recently been translated into English and therefore made available to the common people in their own language for the present time. “Where will it all end?”, Anne asks her small, gathered audience.

Where indeed? Katherine may be a reformer at heart, but she is also staunchly royalist and believes in the King both as an institution and Henry himself specifically.

And then Henry (Jude Law) comes back from the wars, bringing her time as Regent to an end.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Firebrand

Directed by Karim Ainouz
Certificate 15
121 minutes
Released 6 September

Reviewed for Reform magazine.

History. The Tudors. King Henry VIII wanted a male heir to the throne. His first wife failed to deliver, so he divorced her. When the Pope excommunicated him, Henry set up the new, Protestant, Church of England. He kept marrying new wives who ended up, as a popular rhyme puts it, ‘divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived’.

The wife who died, Jane Seymour, gave Henry his desired son – however, Edward (Patrick Buckley) later dies at age 15. The wife who survived, Katherine Parr (Alicia Vikander), is the subject of this movie, which deals with the later period of Henry’s sixth marriage… [Read the rest at Reform magazine]

[Read my longer, alternative review on this site.]

Firebrand is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, September 6th.

Trailer: