religion

Traitor (DVD)

~ Nikki Baughan

Killing in the name of…

There’s a sense that not all is as it seems at the beginning of Jeffrey Nachmanoff’s explosive thriller; for a start, Don Cheadle is playing a bad guy. Yes, hard as it is to believe Cheadle, the loveable Cock-er-ny rogue from the Ocean’s movies, stars as Samir Hord, a former US Special Operations officer who is now selling bombs to Islamic radicals in Yemen. But he hadn’t reckoned on the due diligence of FBI agent Roy Clayton (Guy Pearce), and is caught up in a raid and imprisoned. Befriending an influential fellow inmate, Samir becomes part of an escape plot, gains his freedom and becomes integral to a plot to simultaneously blow up buses across small town America. But is he really a terrorist at heart?

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Doubt (DVD)

~ Nikki Baughan

Sister of mercy?

Watching her play God-fearing nun Sister Aloysius Beauvier, you would be forgiven for thinking that Meryl Streep had simply chosen the role that was the furthest removed from her colourful, energetic turn in Mamma Mia! (And who could blame her for wanting to shake off that mantel as quickly as possible.) But, whatever her reasons for choosing Doubt Streep is, as ever, one of its highlights.

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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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