Review: Star Trek

Let's play a little game of word association. If I said 'majestic', 'enjoyable' and 'meaningful', you wouldn't think Star Trek, right? No. But if I said 'lazy', 'predictable' and 'dull'.... well, that's Star Trek down to a tee – at least, that's how it's been for the past decade and a half. Of late, Star Trek has been a poten...

Review: Religulous

There's a new kind of film on the block. And Religulous is it. To call it a documentary is a palpable nonsense: it's a documentary in the same way that a film without any CGI is a documentary - a record of staged events engineered to create and further an opinion. In effect, Religulous is a filmed thesis; a visual presentation o...

Review: Hellboy II: The Golden Army

In the cinematic dark ages i.e. before The Dark Knight and Iron Man, Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy was one of the decade's best comic-book adaptations. The premise was darkly comic, the material sharply human, and the characters behaved as people who happen to be possessed with great powers, not faceless ciphers designed to cynic...

Review: Joy Division

"After those two records, those two works of art, everything else is merchandising the memory." - Peter Saville The lens of time perverts memory. Now, right now, this very second, we are living in historic times. Across the world, right now, events are happening that will be chronicled in history. But us, we’re too busy livin...

Review: Shine A Light

Martin Scorsese’s long-running love affair with music – first cemented with The Last Waltz, confirmed with Bowie’s best ever role in After Hours and the Dylan documentaries – becomes flesh with Shine A Light. Ostensibly a recording of a Rolling Stones concert in New York, Shine A Light is actually an unwitting comedy classic. ...

Review: Be Kind Rewind

Be Kind Rewind is an unsung lament to a sadly dying art. In the same way that Cinema Paradiso harked back to a golden age – the time when the community would gather around a flickering screen and unite by the common spectacle – Michel Gondry’s latest effort manages to evoke that dying memory of the time when people would clap at...

Review: Rambo

Rambo is better than Rambo: First Blood Part II, and Rambo III. Which is kind of like saying being punched in the face until you black out is better than having your foot sawn off by a hedgetrimmer. Rambo is The Blacksploitation Flick of the Noughties. Twenty years after the monumentally stupid Rambo III (dedicated to the freedo...

Review: Next

When you get old, and you look back on your life, you’re going to look in the mirror and ask yourself: “Did I do the right thing? By being in films like National Treasure and The Wicker Man and Ghost Rider, did I make good movies? Did I contribute to humankind?” And you’ll laugh from inside your solid gold mansion with your ...

Top 20 Manliest Movies

Being a man is brilliant. You get to fight, drive cars through explosions, shag birds, drink beer, and be an asshole. But what really make a man a man? Muscles? Sure. Blood, guts, and fisticuffs? It helps. A bit of nationalism? Of course. Wildly improbable baddies, snakes, the Mafia, guns, lots of guns, boxing, and rude w...

Review: Hannibal Rising

Turning Anthony Hopkins’ most memorable performance into a pretentious Jason Voorhees takes a certain, rather considerable ability. Hannibal Rising is the work of an undoubted artistic vandal: it's not an intriguing character study into the mundanity of evil. It's just an exercise in the inanity of evil. Perhaps what is mor...