Tag: action
The Three Musketeers
Saturday, June 8th, 2024 Film Reviews,Why did I wait so long to read Alexandre Dumas? One of literature’s all-time best-sellers, he had to be doing something right. The grandson of a French nobleman and a African slave, Dumas (1802-70) was as unlikely as one of his own plots, and no less successful. He spent money as fast as he made […]
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
Saturday, May 25th, 2024 Film Reviews,All great film series have their highs and lows. A masterpiece is followed by a dud, a long sequence of flops suddenly comes up trumps. One can never be confident that a great film will be followed by an equally compelling sequel, or that a franchise that resembles a dead horse might not spring to […]
Sicario: Day of the Soldado
Friday, June 29th, 2018 Film Reviews,If this were one of those reviews that run in a box at the side of the page it would read: “A relentlessly brutal and stupid film that does no-one any favours.” The chief difference between this sequel and the original Sicario of 2015, comes down to two significant absences. Canadian Director, Denis Villeneuve, has […]
Atomic Blonde
Wednesday, August 9th, 2017 Film Reviews,For a snapshot of the way mainstream cinema has changed over the past 50 years try watching Guy Hamilton’s Funeral in Berlin (1966) before venturing into David Leitch’s Atomic Blonde. As a fan of those early Len Deighton espionage novels, I always thought Funeral in Berlin was a pretty shallow piece of work. The redeeming […]
Baby Driver
Saturday, July 22nd, 2017 Film Reviews,Baby Driver is one hell of a soundtrack in search of a film. A big step up for British director, Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz), it tells the story of a youthful getaway car driver named Baby, who can’t seem to get through any part of the day without musical accompaniment. The […]
Alien Covenant
Friday, May 19th, 2017 Film Reviews,Damien Hirst must feel pissed off that the release of Alien Covenant occurred after he’d already completed his massive Venice Biennale exhibition, Treasures From the Wreck of the Unbelievable. Amid bronze and marble effigies of every conceivable mythological creature, every pop culture icon from Mickey Mouse to Yo-Landi of Die Antwoord, the only character missing […]
Snowden
Thursday, September 22nd, 2016 Film Reviews,Snowden belongs to a peculiar new genre: the fictionalised re-make of the successful documentary – in this case, Laura Poitras’s award-winning Citizenfour (2014). The question for viewers is whether director, Oliver Stone, has brought anything new and vital to the mix that was not canvassed in the real-life film. The answer is ‘no’, unless we […]
The Nice Guys
Thursday, May 26th, 2016 Film Reviews,Take Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling, a sassy blonde teenager, and a salacious story that revolves around the Los Angeles porn industry circa 1977, and you have The Nice Guys. It’s not so much a formula film as half a dozen formulas that director, Shane Black, has mixed together to create a surprisingly fizzy cocktail. […]
X-Men Apocalypse
Thursday, May 19th, 2016 Film Reviews,Not having bothered to watch the past seven – or is it eight? – X-Men films, I feel at a disadvantage when it comes to reviewing this latest installment in a long-running franchise. I didn’t avoid the previous films for any special reason, merely a lack of interest in the overblown superhero genre that has […]
Batman V. Superman: Dawn of Justice
Thursday, March 31st, 2016 Film Reviews,At the age of twelve I read Marvel comics with religious dedication. As a fan one made a clear choice between the Marvel universe and that of its great rival, DC comics. While DC may have had those two archetypal superheroes, Batman and Superman, Marvel had a whole raft of characters that seemed more imaginatively […]