Taranaki Daily News

The best on the box

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James Croot’s

Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth and Amanda Seyfried star in this 2008 adaptation of the hit ABBA-scored jukebox musical which focuses on a bride-to-be’s search for her real father. ‘‘The chorus backs the soloists powerfully, and they are as fresh as the rest of the film: fat and fit, homely and handsome, young gods and old codgers – in short, people you might really see in Greece. Reality in a musical? That alone makes it worth your open-eared attention,’’ wrote The Charlotte Observer’s Lawrence Toppman A tale full of weighty themes and dramatic artifice, this somewhat loose 2016 adaptation of Eleanor Catton’s 2008 debut novel never truly compels, despite the presence of plenty of Kiwi acting luminaries. James Rolleston is Stanley from Whakatane, a firstyear drama student struggling to make an impression at ‘‘The Institute’’. While the exploratio­n of the use of private lives for ‘‘cheap entertainm­ent’’ is interestin­g and adroitly handled, director Alison McLean and writer Emily Perkin seems caught between trying to create a more cinematic story from Catton’s book and remaining true to her prose - some of the descriptiv­e, evocative speeches feel like they’ve come straight from there. Season two of Victoria picks up one month after the end of season one, with the young queen struggling but determined to fulfil her duties to her country and to her family. Set in the 1840s, the decade was one of revolution, famine, and – for Victoria – much childbeari­ng. Tim Roth ( The Hateful Eight) and Christina Hendricks ( Bad Santa 2) star in this 10-part Rocky Mountains-set crime drama that centres on a police detective and a mysterious oil company boss. When the oil company brings organised crime to the sleepy remote town, violence on both sides ensues. With themes stemming from the 2016 presidenti­al election, the seventh season of Ryan Murphy’s anthology series tackles the idea of paranoia through the eyes of a cult. While not much is known about the plot, Murphy is promising an epic love story between the anthology’s starring two players Sarah Paulson and Evan Peters. Taxi to the Dark Side producer Eva Orner returns to her home country of Australia to expose that country’s dirty little secret – its offshore refugee detention centres, in this 2016 documentar­y. Using whistleblo­wer testimony and hidden-camera footage, she manages to capture the horrors, privations and unsafe practices at places like Manus Island.

 ??  ?? Kerry Fox stars in The Rehearsal.
Kerry Fox stars in The Rehearsal.

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