Posted in: by Robert Horton, Contributors, Film Reviews

Review: Robin Hood (2018)

The Sheriff of Nottingham is throwing a big party, and Maid Marian asks Robin Hood if he’ll be attending. She tells Robin she “got an invite” to the party, and at that point I think I mentally checked out of the new Robin Hood. It’s bad enough that people use “invite” as a noun in 2018. But unless this is a Mel Brooks version of ye olde tale, using current slang to tell the Robin Hood story qualifies as an automatic tune-out.

The saga of Robin Hood has been around for almost a thousand years, and if it can withstand Kevin Costner’s accent, it can withstand this haphazard new film. The emphasis here is on a youthful Robin, an origin story that shows us how he came to be the legendary robber. 

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Posted in: by Robert Horton, Contributors, Film Reviews

Film Review: ‘Testament of Youth’

Alicia Vikander

So dull, so respectable, so full of nice touches and pretty things: Testament of Youth seems like just the kind of film the real Vera Brittain would have no patience for. Produced in a well-mannered and fully costumed way by BBC Films, this is an adaptation of Brittain’s celebrated 1933 memoir. We follow Vera (Alicia Vikander), a feisty and brainy young woman, as she rebels against her family’s ideas of pre-suffrage femininity and enrolls at Oxford, hoping to become a writer. Her education coincides with the beginning of World War I; her brother Edward (Taron Egerton), her beau Roland (Kit Harington), and two close friends ship off to the front. Vera suspends her study to serve as a nurse near the trenches.

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