Wednesday, February 12, 2025
Blitz 2023
Location: SilverCity
Showtimes: 6:30 & 8:40 pm


Director: Steve McQueen
Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Elliott Heffernan, Harris Dickinson, Benjamin Clémentine
Running Time: 120 minutes
Language: English


Washington DC Area Film Critics Association Awards, Best Youth Performance: Elliott Hefferman. Middleburg Film Festival: Director Visionary Award: Steve McQueen; Critics Choice Awards Celebration of Cinema and Television: Director Award for Film. 21 other nominations. 


“…it works as a fine McQueen war drama that shows how the racially diverse Londoners endured the 1940 Nazi Blitz.” Dennis Schwartz Movie Reviews 


Blitz is a powerful film about the German bombing of London in 1940. It’s told through the eyes of George, a 9-year-old boy. Young Elliott Heffernan does a remarkable job of carrying the emotional impact of many key sequences.


Even through the eyes of an innocent, writer-director Steve McQueen provides heightened realism in terms of the continuous numbing aerial attacks upon London. 


Hefferman is matched by Saoirse Ronan as Rita, who suddenly finds herself a single mother as her lover and the lad’s Grenadian father is deported. She has to raise her mixed-race son at a particularly tricky time. 


A factory worker like so many young women of that period, she has done the responsible thing and sent the youngster away from London but he stubbornly refuses to stay on the rescue train and jumps off at his first opportunity, determined to make his way home. His many and varied misadventures make up the rest of the narrative.


London citizens were renowned for their bravery, resilience and “stiff-upper-lip” attitude towards the Nazi onslaught. But McQueen inserts another reality reserved for those fellow citizens and neighbours who represent a different ethnicity.  Blitz exposes some of lesser known social and racial chasms found beneath the surface of stalwart unified resistance.


The movie is certain to pull at the heart strings as George resolutely attempts to be reunited with his mother and grandfather (Peter Weller).  


Also worthy of acknowledgement is Adam Stockhausen’s (“The Grand Budapest Hotel,” “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny”) production design which is impressive, brimming with gritty authenticity. 

Wednesday, January 29, 2025
The Outrun 2024
Location: SilverCity
Showtimes: 6:30 & 8:40 pm


Director: Nora Fingscheidt
Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Saskia Reeves, Stephen Dillane
Running Time: 118 minutes
Language: English


Telluride Film Festival: Silver Medallion Award, Saoirse Ronan; Mallorca International Film Festival: Best Actress, Saoirse Ronan; 20 other nominations


“Saoirse Ronan is the luminous north star of every scene of this moving drama about addiction which is also a powerful character study.” –Liz Braun, original.cin 


German director and writer Nora Fingscheidt (“System Crasher”/”The Unforgiveable”) and co-writers Amy Liptrot and Daisy Lewis, base their highly personal film on Liptrot’s memoir (2016). It presents a powerful, sensitive and exhausting survival recovery film on being an alcoholic. It takes shape as a non-linear and unconventional telling of a familiar movie story that is told without the usual clichés.

Saoirse Ronan, in an Oscar winning performance, plays Rona, an alcoholic. Paapa Essiedu plays Daynin, her caring boyfriend who leaves her when he no longer can handle her outbursts.

Rona was raised on her bipolar suffering Englishman father’s (Stephen Dillane) farm in Scotland’s Orkney Islands, in the northeast north, where she playfully rebuffed her mom’s (Saskia Reeves) Christianity.  As a young woman she lived a troubled wild party life in London. With her life eventually screwed up over her alcohol addiction, she returns at age 30 to the beautiful and quiet Orkney Islands to recover.

The film smoothly veers back and forth between her drunken club life in swinging London and her sober life in Scotland.

At a latter point in her recovery, Rona seeks more solitude and moves farther north to the remote island of Papa Westray, whose population is around 70. Her internet and the warmth of the accepting locals, help in her realistic strides to recover.

The electronic music she listens to on her headphones mixed with the pounding surf at Orkney, is compared to the tumultuous nightlife scenes in London.

The road to recovery is no picnic, and that Ronan is so convincing in trying to gain her sobriety, elevates this humanistic drama of dealing with personal pain and shame into a first-rate pic on a troubled young woman’s self-discovery.

Wednesday, January 22, 2025
The Great Escaper:  UK 2023
Location: SilverCity
Showtimes: 6:30 & 8:30 pm


Director: Oliver Parker
Cast: Michael Caine, Glenda Jackson
Running Time: 96 minutes
Language: English


Barcelona Film Festival, Best Actor: Michael Caine


“The Great Escaper has all the hallmarks of a British stiff-upper-lip drama, but transcends the “cheeky chappie” stereotypes with the performances of the late, great Glenda Jackson and eternal favourite Michael Caine.”—Richard Crouse, CTV


Michael Caine and the late Glenda Jackson bring their A games to this true-life story about the 89-year-old WW II Royal Navy veteran Bernard Jordan who in 2014 jauntily sneaked out of his seaside care home (where he lived with his wife Irene) on a secret mission to get aboard a cross-channel ferry and attend the 70th anniversary celebrations of the D-day landings in Normandy — having failed to get included on an official group excursion. He was dubbed “the great escaper” in the press. 


Caine is Jordan, bringing plenty of droll and lugubrious spark to the role, shuffling up and down the seafront, grumpily denouncing the trendy cyclists almost running him over on the pavement as “tossers” and letting the air out of their tires. 


Caine is arguably upstaged by Jackson as Irene, or Rene, who is snarky and sardonic to everyone, including her care worker Adele (an excellent performance from Danielle Vitalis). Rene has to cover up for Bernard; she is, after all, in on his plan, and tells the nurses and managers that her absent husband is just out on a long early walk, giving Bernard enough time to get on the ferry before the alarm is raised.


There’s a huge amount to enjoy from these legendary performers: Caine and Jackson are a great double-act, despite being apart for much of the film, and the film imagines an interesting and poignant rapport between Bernard and an elderly ex-RAF officer on the ferry, sympathetically played by John Standing, who is heading for Normandy while crucified by a secret guilt. Caine has a bold flash of rage by the official graves at all the criminal waste of lives created by war.


Caine and Jackson and their ineffable class give this film some real grit: it’s a wonderful last hurrah for Jackson and there is something moving and even awe-inspiring in seeing these two British icons together.


Whether his ‘retirement’ holds or not, this may be the last opportunity to the great Michael Caine on the big screen.