100 Nights of Hero

Maika Monroe as Cherry

100 Nights of Hero re-invents the One Thousand and One Nights, aka The Arabian Nights, aka the story of Scheherazade, making sex and gender dynamics more explicit even than they were in the original stories and packaging everything up like a gift of Turkish delight wrapped in gossamer, drenched in perfume, and then swaddled in silk. Don’t come for realism, in other words. Instead director Julia Jackman defiantly heads into the realm of the fantastical, the exotic, the exquisite. Her Middle East is one of grand viziers and curly slippers rather than mad mullahs and nuclear enrichment facilities. So, we all know the Scheherazade story. A wily virgin bride, the latest in a … Read more

Red, White & Royal Blue

Henry and Alex covered in cake

Hands across the sea – and down each other’s trousers – in Red, White & Royal Blue, a cute love story about the son of the US president falling for a British prince. It is the old Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers tale of two people who really don’t get on, until they suddenly do. The snobbish, standoffish Prince Henry and the loud American Alex Claremont-Diaz, who are thrown together at one protocol-heavy event after another, where they regularly irritate the hell out of each other until things come spectacularly to a head at the wedding of the prince’s older brother, when the pair of them somehow end up under the wedding cake, covered in … Read more