Ewan McGregor

The Men Who Stare At Goats (DVD)

~ Nikki Baughan

All in the mind

Those familiar with journalist Jon Ronson will know that his choice of interviewees and approach shares commonalties with Louis Theroux’s spiel; where be it affected or not, he often appears a naïf amongst loonies. This probably reached its apex when Ronson investigated purported members of a top-secret psychic warfare unit, for a television documentary several years ago. His bizarre findings, which have also appeared in print, form the inspiration for The Men Who Stare at Goats.

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Angels & Demons (2009)

~ Nikki Baughan

Church Wars Episode II: A New Pope

Despite the fact that Ron Howard’s 2006 adaptation of Dan Brown’s blockbusting bestseller The DaVinci Code was accompanied by a wave of critical apathy, the film still did well enough at the box office (thanks in no small part to the loyalty of the book’s millions of fans) to make another movie a certainty. Angels and Demons is that movie and, unsurprisingly, it treads much the same path as its predecessor; it’s very long, very melodramatic and very middle-of-the-road.

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