Jonathan Cavendish

While this biopic has the standard sumptuous production values of a British period drama, it's also a lot more complex than expected. For his directing debut, Andy Serkis recounts the life of a man who is so genuinely inspirational that he never needs to crank up the sentimentality. Characters burst with personality, and the events unfold with some unexpected complications that make the movie strikingly edgy. It also, of course, looks gorgeous.

This is the story of Robin Cavendish (Andrew Garfield), who travels to Kenya in 1958 with his pregnant wife Diana (Claire Foy) on tea-plantation business and is stricken with polio, paralysed from the neck down and needing a ventilator to breathe. They move back to England, where Robin gets increasingly annoyed by his life in hospital. So he convinces Diana to take him home, against the doctors' advice, and gets his inventor pal Teddy (Hugh Bonneville) to design a chair with a built-in respirator so he can get out and about. This is a revolution for him, and he becomes an advocate in helping severely disabled people like him find independence from hospital care so they can life their lives.

Continue reading: Breathe Review

Gangster No. 1 feels like pieces a bunch of other, better movies slapped together -- GoodFellas' musical selections, the violence from American Psycho and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, a dash of any Quentin Tarantino or Guy Ritchie style of editing, Malcolm McDowell in a performance recalling A Clockwork Orange. Some of it's fun, but it just isn't original or creative.

Continue reading: Gangster No. 1 Review