Jim Norton

  • 07 January 2011

Occupation

Actor

The Boy Trailer

Greta is a young nanny who has moved over from America to a small town in England to take care of a couple's child while they're away. It initially looks like a wonderful opportunity; Greta has a large, chic country home all to herself and gets to spend time with the handsome grocery boy, Malcolm. However, it soon turns bizarre when the elderly couple - Mr. and Mrs. Heelshire - introduce her to their son Brahms who, in fact, is not a boy in the usual sense, but a life sized porcelain doll brought in 20 years previously following the death of their real son in a fire. The Heelshires provide Greta with a list of strict rules to follow in taking care of Brahms, including food and bedtime routines, but Greta can't see the importance of treating Brahms like a real boy and ignores them - much to her peril. It isn't long before she realises she's dealing with no ordinary doll.

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Jimmy's Hall Trailer

Jimmy Gralton is a political activist in the 1930s with strong communist values. Unfortunately, this doesn't put him in the best light for Ireland's Catholic church, who consider he, his friends and associates to be antichrists. Jimmy runs a dance hall whereby he makes his views heard as the people of his town enjoy music and socialising as well as learning together and creating happy memories. The local priest doesn't see it as such a great thing though and he subsequently does his best to convince his parishioners that the hall brings nothing but evil to the neighbourhood. Those for the continuation of the hall's practises suddenly find themselves violently up against the protesting Catholic community, and two things that were always supposed to be about peace and civic spirit suddenly become armies who'll stop at nothing to defend their values.

'Jimmy's Hall' is a shocking Irish drama based on a true story during the 'Red Scare' in Ireland in the 1930s. BAFTA nominated director Ken Loach ('Sweet Sixteen', 'My Name Is Joe', 'The Navigators') is at the helm alongside screenwriter Paul Laverty ('The Wind That Shakes the Barley', 'The Angels' Share', 'Cargo'). It is scheduled to be released in the UK on May 30th 2014.

Water For Elephants Trailer

In the 1930's The Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth was known as the best circus in America, a small and tight knit community of performers and animals who were all masters of their craft. When trainee veterinarian Jacob Jankowski finds himself as a passenger on their circus train he soon becomes part of the family. Hired to look after the animals he meets Marlena, a beautiful woman who performs as an equestrian star and her husband August, the head animal trainer; it doesn't take long for Jacob to see there's a sinister side to August's personality.

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The Boy In The Striped Pajamas Review

By Paul Brenner

Very Good

In Mark Herman's adaptation of John Boyne's controversial children's bestseller offering a kid's-eye view of Holocaust, the young eight-year-old Bruno (Asa Butterfield) has the wide, blue-eyed innocence of the unprotected. Sheltered and half in a fantasy world, he runs through city streets with his friends, his arms outstretched like wings, gliding untouched through the busy and congested world of adults. Herman bathes these opening scenes in a fantastic fairy-tale burnish, like a golden world ready to be lost.

Bruno shares a family dinner with his loving parents (Vera Farmiga and David Thewlis) and his older sister Gretel (Amber Beattie). With their sparkling British Masterpiece Theatre accents, the family appears as well-scrubbed paragons of British banality. (Even Richard Johnson, that great bastion of British nobility from the epics of the 1960s, is exhumed to appear as the family's Grandpa.) So it comes as a shock when Thewlis dons a German commandant's uniform for a going-away party and Herman quietly reveals that the Dad has been reassigned, taking the family with him. As Dad remarks, "Home is where the family is." In this case, however, home is Auschwitz and Dad is the new camp commandant, who will be supervising the mass exterminations.

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