Julia Hamilton, Author at Catholic Herald

Julia Hamilton

‘A daring raid deep inside the monarchy’: Netflix dramatisation of Prince Andrew’s infamous interview

April 18, 2024

Last month Netflix aired its latest production to do with the British royal family; no, not another series of The Crown, but a drama “based on real events, fictionalised for dramatic purposes” – plus ca change, then – of the bombshell Newsnight interview Emily Maitlis famously conducted with Prince Andrew on 16 November 2019, concerning his long friendship

Strings attached: Bradley Cooper’s take on Leonard Bernstein is a success

January 06, 2024

Julia Hamilton loves Bradley Cooper’s take on Leonard Bernstein. This is not just any old biopic. This is Bradley Cooper’s stunning take on the towering cultural figure of Leonard Bernstein – co-written and directed by Cooper, to boot. Maestro covers miles of chronological ground, beginning with an aged, white-haired Lenny armed with two indispensable items,

Wildcat reviewed: Who is this Flannery O’Connor?

November 04, 2023

Anyone unfamiliar with her life and work may remain so after Ethan Hawke’s latest, Julia Hamilton despairs. In his latest film, Wildcat, about the American Southern Gothic writer Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964), director Ethan Hawke (together with his co-writer Shelby Gaines) continues his fascination with the creative process that was apparent in his last film, Blaze,

Poirot, but not as we know him: A Haunting in Venice, reviewed by Julia Hamilton

September 30, 2023

Christie as a horror movie doesn’t work, says Julia Hamilton. A Haunting in Venice is the third in a trilogy of films produced and acted in by Kenneth Branagh as the celebrated and beloved detective Hercule Poirot. Every generation has its own Poirot – my favourite of all time is David Suchet, who simply is

Oppenheimer, reviewed by Julia Hamilton

August 31, 2023

The film’s events are magnetically clustered around Los Alamos, finds Julia Hamilton. If you thought that Christopher Nolan’s last film, Dunkirk, was over-rated unhistorical nonsense – I confess I did – then Oppenheimer, his latest, starring Cillian Murphy in the performance of his life as the Faustian over-reacher that was Oppenheimer (or “Oppie”, as his

The Miracle Club: reviewed by Julia Hamilton

August 02, 2023

Julia Hamilton finds this film set in 1960s Ireland baffling and dissatisfying. Reconciliation is a tough gig, is the message of The Miracle Club (directed by Thaddeus O’Sullivan), set in 1960s Ireland, dramatising the hard road to reconciliation that four Irish working-class women from the same village embark on during a pil- grimage by bus

This is not an adventure: Dial of Destiny reviewed by Julia Hamilton

July 05, 2023

Julia Hamilton finds Dial of Destiny just a bit dull. To use the word resurrect-ion to describe Harrison Ford’s appearance after such a long gap (Crystal Skull dropped in 2008) in this fifth and final instalment of the Indiana Jones franchise is a bit of a contradiction. When we first meet Indy in the opening

Pamfir: A moral tale for our times

June 01, 2023

Julia Hamilton is gripped by Ukrainian crime thriller Pamfir. This stunning film is the feature-length debut of Ukrainian director Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk, with the actor Oleksandr Yatsentyuk playing the eponymous leading role of Leonid Pamfir, which means “stone” in Ukrainian, or, perhaps, “rock”. Pamfir himself is as solid as his nickname, a veteran smuggler who, in

Miracles might happen

May 12, 2023

Hollywood continues to stereotype the Church, says Julia Hamilton. Miracle at Manchester is a drama, based on a true story, of high-school sophomore Brycen Newman (note the appropriate surname), a student at Cathedral Catholic High School in San Diego who is diagnosed with medulloblastoma, an extremely aggressive and fast-growing type of brain cancer. The opening

To Leslie, reviewed by Julia Hamilton

April 01, 2023

Andrea Riseborough as a recovering alcoholic is the best thing about To Leslie, says Julia Hamilton. In her latest film, To Leslie, Andrea Riseborough plays a small-town, West Texas single mother, a complete basket case of a rock-bottom drunk who’s made such a mess of her life that she is bankrupt on all fronts: physically,

Tár: Cate Blanchett deserves an Oscar for her role in this disturbing and divisive new film

February 09, 2023

Todd Field’s first film for sixteen years, Tár – starring Cate Blanchett as Lydia Tár, an American superstar composer-conductor – has divided audiences for reasons that slowly but subtly reveal themselves as the film progresses. To begin with we see Tár in all her carefully constructed professional and intellectual glory. A protégée of Leonard Bernstein, she twinkles

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