Abi Lendrum

Musician Jackson Maine (Bradley Cooper) falls in love with struggling singer-songwriter Aly (Lady Gaga). As her fame grows, their relationship is pushed to the limit. A Star is Born is a remarkable yet flawed debut by actor-turned-director Bradley Cooper. The apex of A Star is Born is undoubtedly the soundtrack; but with Grammy award winning singer-songwriter Lady Gaga on board, this is hardly a surprise. As a film about music and what it means to make music that’s true to you, it’s essential that the soundtrack be real, songs that you would hear in the charts in real life. A lot of films seem to struggle to recreate this, but not A Star is Born . Every song oozes with authenticity, and it will be no surprise come February 2019 when Cooper and Gaga take home the Oscar for Best Original Song. Lady Gaga offers a phenomenal debut performance as Aly, but it could have been even better. Despite the narrative of the film focusing primarily around Aly and her rise to fame, we never...

A young nun (Taissa Farmiga) and a priest (Demián Bichir) investigate the demonic forces at work in a Romanian Abbey. Yet another victim of the James Wan school of jumpscares, The Nun is an underwhelming cliché of horror movie tropes. Like Insidious 4: The Last Key , The Nun is another horror film that falls into the 'show and then tell' dialogue trap. Although there were some genuinely unnerving moments scattered throughout the film, the problem lies in the fact that the director (Corin Hardy) feels the need to explain every single scare through the dialogue. A prime example of this is an early sequence where Sister Irene (Taissa Farmiga), Father Burke (Demián Bichir), and a villager, Frenchie, (Jonas Bloquet) come back to the Abbey to find the dead body of a nun sitting upright. The scare lies in one line of dialogue; Frenchie is taken aback by the nun and states, "That's not how I left her". This is a moment that had so much potential - but the audience nev...