CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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Black Widow
MARIA DUARTE welcomes the first solo film for Marvel's Black Widow
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
Black Widow (12A)
Directed by Cate Shortland
⭑⭑⭑⭑
LONG overdue and warranted, Scarlett Johansson’s Russian spy turned Avenger black widow finally joins her male colleagues with her very own solo film, tackling issues of sleeper cells, child abuse, abduction and weaponisation.
These form the backbone of Natasha Romanoff’s rich and dark backstory, hinted at throughout the other Marvel films. This opens with a 12-year-old Natasha (an impressive Ever Anderson) living a happy life in Ohio in 1995 with her six-year-old sister Yelena (Violet McGraw) and their parents Melina (a phenomenal Rachel Weisz) and Alexei Shostakov (David Harbour).
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