Ghostly crypts with ancient secrets. Children possessed by the Devil. Levitating demons. New film The Pope’s Exorcist – starring Russell Crowe and in cinemas now – is perhaps not the most obvious advert for an easy-breezy minibreak in Rome. But the supernatural shocker, based on the chilling real-life accounts of Vatican chief exorcist Father Gabriele Amorth, does touch on an enduring aspect of the Eternal City’s appeal to tourists. Part of Rome’s lure is its darker, slightly spooky side, and the pervading sense of ecclesiastical mystery down every street. Read More...
Few feature films have captured a nation's agony more dramatically than Roland Joffé's The Killing Fields. It tells the story of Cambodia's Year Zero, when Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge entered the capital, Phnom Penh, emptied it, turned the population into serfs and slaughtered nearly three million of them. To tell the story of this genocide, the picture has one conventional aspect - the perspective of American journalist Sydney Schanberg (Sam Waterston) - and one less so - the experiences of his Cambodian stringer, Dith Pran, played by Haing S Ngor, a Cambodian doctor whose own suffering at the time was, if anything, even worse than that depicted in the film. Read More...
Hotelier, night manager, former soldier, dogsbody to the rich and famous: Jonathan Pine is a complicated man who keeps his secrets hidden beneath a surface sheen of grace and discretion.
Pine has been recruited by intelligence officer Angela Burr to spy on suave British arms dealer Richard Roper. Having 'saved' Roper's son in a staged kidnapping, Pine is close to penetrating Roper's inner circle. But no everybody believes he's all that he seems. Read More...
