Quintessa Swindell

Master Gardener

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Narvel and Maya

The guy who wrote Taxi Driver is at it again. Master Gardener, as so often with Paul Schrader, is a film about human beings in need of redemption, a worthless humanity rather a wicked world. Schrader, it comes as no surprise to learn, was raised in the Calvinist Christian Reformed Church. Joel Edgerton’s Narvel Roth could almost be an older version of Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle. Roth is a guy with a complicated history – or so the alarming tattoos all over his back and chest suggest – who has put his past behind him and now leads a sedate and austere life as the head gardener on an estate owned by grande … Read more

Black Adam

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Black Adam

Black Adam is the superhero film for people who’ve had enough of them. Or it wants to be. Full of familiar elements given a dry witty twist, it stars Dwayne Johnson as an immortal creature who returns to his native city of Kahndaq to save the citizens of a brutally colonised Middle Eastern city in their hour of need. So far, so King Arthur, though Black Adam, whose name is Teth Adam at this point, is actually more like the mummy from The Mummy Returns (an early foray into acting by Johnson, all those millennia ago) crossed with the terminator from The Terminator. The Terminator comparisons gain weight when Teth Adam takes up … Read more