Film Reviews

So there is a bad Coen Brothers film. Dispiritingly, this was my first thought once the credits rolled for The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Even worse, I started to think it about 30 minutes in. As someone who has spent the last decade insisting The Big Lewbowski and No Country for Old Men are more than just overly-violent nonsense, I had to concede that the latest offering from Joel and Ethan is, sadly, just that.  The film's plot (and it's generous to claim it has one) rests...

Disclaimer: I had watched seven John Carpenter films in a row immediately prior to sitting down to this. I do not think this affected my judgement, but I don't know for sure. Wreck-It-Ralph is a hugely fun movie. A heartfelt nod to the arcade games of yonder, a protagonist echoing without plagiarising Toy Story, and some sentimental and hilarious moments to show that Disney Animation Studios could still compete with Pixar. Which is all what made Ralph Breaks The Internet so disappointing to me....

If you splice Mean Girls, Spring Breakers and Tarantino levels of blood together you end up with Assassination Nation. Focusing on how the suburban enclave of Salem “loses its motherfucking mind”, after a mysterious hacker divulges the town’s deepest, darkest secrets online. Sam Levinson’s film starts off with its pedal to floor and doesn’t relent for a dizzying 110 minutes. The fatal trigger for the town is when the conservative (used here instead of Republican) town mayor is outed as a cross-dresser. The scandal! As one townsperson says, “he ran on a ticket of family values!”. He commits...

Just a couple of reviews this week, both from my catch up on 2018 titles. Megan Leavey In this fact based drama, Kate Mara plays Megan Leavey, who, at 20, joins the Marines out of a sense that her life isn’t going anywhere. She ends up training as a dog handler, paired with a bomb clearing dog named Rex. Megan and Rex are injured while clearing a field of mines. In danger and with another dog unit hours away, they...

The first Lisbeth Salander story not to be penned by acclaimed nordic noir writer Stieg Larsson sees the return of the infamous kick-ass vigilante hacker in a film that sadly fails to measure up to its predecessors on almost every front. Directed by Fede Alvarez (Evil Dead) and adapted from David Lagercrantz’s 2015 novel of the same name, The Girl In The Spider’s Web stars Claire Foy (The Crown, First Man) in a role first made famous by Noomi Rapace, and later Rooney Mara.  Kicking off with a prologue...

The Nutcracker and the Four RealmsDisney’s latest would be blockbuster isn’t another live action remake of one of its animated classics. That’s not to say it’s particularly good though. This version of the fairytale perennial is based both on the story by ETA Hoffmann and the ballet by Tchaikovsky. It finds Clara (Mackenzie Foy) being given a magical key that used to belong to her late mother, which lets her into a magical world, where her mother was once queen....

Del (Peter Dinklage) is pretty sure he’s the last man on Earth. When we meet him there has been an unspecified catastrophe, in which it seems everyone simply collapsed and died. Del, alone, works his way around his nameless town, going house to house, cleaning up and burying the bodies he finds. One day he sees fireworks going off outside the library he used to work at and now makes his home in. This leads him to meet Grace (Elle...

The second instalment in J.K. Rowling’s five part Fantastic Beasts story sees director David Yates at the helm once again, in this well acted if ultimately lacklustre sequel to its critically acclaimed 2016 predecessor, which saw a welcome return to the magical Harry Potter universe. Set a year on from its predecessor, The Crimes Of Grindelwald opens in late 20s New York, where evil wizard Grindelwald has been languishing in an American Ministry of Magic prison, awaiting his trial. When he uses his dark arts to escape, Grindelwald makes his way...

Note: This is a slightly rewritten version of a review from a screening at the London Film Festival 2017, published here to tie in with my review of Luca Guadagnino’s remake. While he continues to dilute his legacy with garbage like Giallo and Dracula 3D (and the rest of the last two decades), it’s a fine time to be reminded that, at one time, Dario Argento made some of the most visually stunning horror cinema ever seen. Suspiria, recoloured to...