Tag: adventure
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 […]
Solo: A Star Wars Story
Friday, May 25th, 2018 Film Reviews,If you’ve ever wondered what Han Solo did before the first Star Wars film, Solo: A Star Wars Story provides all the details. It seems he spent a lot of time flying spaceships and shooting at amazingly incompetent enemies with ray guns. Wow! That was a surprise. One never expects a Star Wars movie to […]
Passengers
Friday, January 13th, 2017 Film Reviews,Writing in the 1920s Aldous Huxley denounced the joyless “Good Time” that had made people into passive consumers of art and entertainment. Huxley regretted that the cinema had killed off amateur theatrics, while music making at home had been supplanted by the gramophone. He believed this indulgence in instant entertainment led to a crippling sense […]
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
Thursday, October 6th, 2016 Film Reviews,Tim Burton is Hollywood’s greatest celebrant of non-conformity. This is partly a reflection of his own battles with studios to make the movies he wants, the way he wants. Throughout his career one can feel the ebb and flow of that drive as he wins some rounds and loses others. My favourite Burton films are […]
Sausage Party
Friday, August 19th, 2016 Film Reviews,In Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel, White Noise, two professors from a Mid-western University roam around a supermarket with their shopping trolleys. Murray, from the Department of Popular Culture, analyses the experience and decides it’s like being in a Tibetan temple. “Look how well-lighted everything is…” he says, “sealed off…timeless… Dying is an art in Tibet…Chants, […]
Embrace of the Serpent
Thursday, August 4th, 2016 Film Reviews,There can’t be many films in which the lead actor has never actually seen a movie before, let alone starred in one. This unique achievement belongs to Nilbio Torres, an Amazonian Indian who plays a lead role in Ciro Guerra’s Embrace of the Serpent, the first Columbian film to have been nominated for an Academy […]
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 […]
Midnight Special
Thursday, April 21st, 2016 Film Reviews,Midnight Special begins in the middle, as if we had just loaded up episode two of a series. It’s late at night in a seedy motel room, and there is an item on the TV about the kidnapping of an eight-year-old boy named Alton Meyer. We swiftly realise that we are looking at the boy […]
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 […]
The Revenant
Thursday, January 7th, 2016 Film Reviews,When he was receiving the Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director at last year’s Academy Awards, Alejandro González Iñárritu, was already preoccupied with his next feature. He had begun planning The Revenant as early as 2011 but put it on hold when lead actor, Leonardo DiCaprio, was required for The Wolf of Wall Street. […]