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Review: In the Tall Grass is a creeper but it won't make you soil yourself

Movie Review | Luke Whiston | 14th October 2019

"This is like one of those rubbish Stephen King film adaptations" I blurted out not long after In The Tall Grass had started - which was fine because I was watching it on Netflix at home. A few minutes later while checking out the film's IMDB page on my phone - again, fine - I saw it actually was a Stephen King adaptation, that also happened to be rubbish. Maybe if I'd been paying more attention the film would have seemed less rubbish. Or maybe if it was less rubbish I wouldn't have been tempted by my phone, despite being a near-40-year-old adult who should know better. Maybe cinemas should be cheaper. Maybe Netflix shouldn't exist so I'm forced to go to a cinema and concentrate. Basically whatever makes it someone else's fault except mine.

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Review: Between Two Ferns: The Movie justifies its own existence... just

Movie Review | Luke Whiston | 11th October 2019

There are a few hurdles to clear before getting on board with Between Two Ferns: The Movie. Firstly, the idea of a fairly one-note sketch show stretched to feature length is inevitably going to require padding. Secondly, stars playing wacky exaggerated versions of themselves gets tedious real quick. And thirdly, celebrities being pranked yet are clearly in on the joke because they'd never have agreed to appear otherwise is a bit, y'know, shit. I guess if you're able to separate yourself by a few degrees then you stand a chance of being entertained by the quasi-meta comedy on offer. But if you can't do that then, well, you're screwed really. It's hard work enjoying films these days.

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Review: Joker discovers the magical art of not giving a f*ck

Movie Review | Becky Suter | 8th October 2019

To be honest, I had every intention of getting this review done as soon as I’d watched the film on Friday, but then I got distracted by Untitled Goose Game and the rest of the weekend was a bit of a waterfowl blur, to be honest. My waking hours were mainly spent terrorising a small, English village, checking off my to-do list before I grew bored and wanted to fuck shit up, just for the sake of it. I stole goods from a small business and planted them in a man’s garden to frame him for theft for pure lols. I trapped the boy in the garage over and over again, because I thought he was was weak and he didn’t like my honking. Unbound by societal demands, I was liberated; I was free. The poor inhabitants of the village had done nothing to deserve my feathery reign of terror, other than they didn’t like me and therefore, I didn’t like them. By the end of the weekend, had even one villager shown just a morsel of kindness toward me (a piece of bread, perhaps), I would have just honked in their stupid faces, and continued to destroy everything they hold dear. I didn’t set out to be the figurehead of the goose rebellion; they made me that way. Throughout the ages, village elders will tell tales of "The Goose That Hid in a Box, Then Jumped Out and Scared the Lady.” In the early hours of the morning with no more worlds left to conquer, I closed my laptop and remembered I said I was going to do a write-up of Joker, about a marginalised character on the fringes of society who adopts an alter-ego in a downward spiral, and I realised my story had already been told, except it was filmed a lot better and had Joaquin Phoenix in it and not so many geese.

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Review: Gemini Man proves a blunt instrument can't have a cutting edge

Movie Review | Ali Gray | 6th October 2019

Gemini Man, to its credit, is a film that couldn't feasibly have existed until this precise moment in time. Ang Lee, perennial pusher of envelopes, has created a movie of such terrifying technological oomph, it simply could not have been made before now - it feels so new and box fresh, if you squint, you can still see the price tag on all the pixels. The ultra-high 100fps frame rate - suck it, The Hobbit! - in combination with native 3D and mind-boggling de-ageing CG imagery gives Gemini Man the feel of a cutting edge tech demo on an impossibly expensive John Lewis TV that you could never dream of affording. What's truly baffling, then, is why a movie boasting such impressive visuals would be sold so short by a story that feels like something Steven Seagal would have passed on in 1998.

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Review: Avengement roundhouse kicks the dictionary in the throat

Movie Review | Luke Whiston | 3rd October 2019

The most tense pub situation I've ever been in was on a Sunday morning in a Wetherspoons, in Bristol. I'd gone there for breakfast despite the owner's recent stance on Brexit; the promise of free coffee refills enough to overcome any amount of bigotry. I joined the queue at the self-serve machine and edged my way forward, but two people shy of my goal disaster struck: the machine had stopped working. The air turned immediately oppressive, and remained so for several minutes until an extremely nervous man came to put new beans in the machine under the watchful, angry, twitchy eyes of the entire pub. It's no exaggeration to say if he'd spilled a single bean the place would have erupted in an orgy of savage violence. So in a way I feel like I have already lived through the events of Avengement, aka the sweariest fucking film ever cunting made.

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Review: Hurricane is cheap as chips but rises above to tell a stirring tale

Movie Review | Luke Whiston | 25th September 2019

"Chaos with Ed Miliband or stability with me" David Cameron declared in 2015, before quitting and plunging the country into a turmoil the two Prime Ministers since have managed to somehow make worse. But despite austerity measures and fox hunting and all the other cartoonishly cruel Tory pursuits, nothing compares to the completely avoidable damage leaving the European Union is going to wreak. Food and medicine supplies interrupted; regions of industry due to be decimated; the Pound Sterling crippled - all because of vain grabs for glory by power-hungry millionaires who got lucky that enough people on Facebook could be convinced the Romanian brickie down the street was the root cause of all their problems, and not the hereditary bankers with secret offshore accounts waiting to stiff their fellow countryfolk. But the harm is done, and we can never go back to a time when Sunday dinner wasn't a simmering saucepan of gritted teeth pleasantries, ready to boil over as you ask your freshly emboldened racist aunt to please pass the bloody swede. Well I wish we could find a way to project Hurricane onto the White Cliffs of Dover and force all the gullible idiots who voted for Brexit to watch it, not least because to do so they'd have to GET IN THE FUCKING SEA.

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Review: The Red Sea Diving Resort sinks under the weight of its own clichés

Movie Review | Luke Whiston | 16th September 2019

Is it still white saviour complex if the events actually happened? Or is it a different kind of white saviour complex; one for the benefit of white audiences, to make them feel better about conditions in other countries that probably had something to do with them sticking their oar in at some point in history? Are we challenging ourselves by broaching such subjects in the first place: a tacit acceptance of blame by not sugarcoating the human casualties of conflict? Was a film ostensibly about ethnic cleansing the right time to show off Chris Evans' side-ass and the top bit of his pubes? Many questions.

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Review: Secret Obsession features the world's worst criminal mastermind

Movie Review | Luke Whiston | 6th September 2019

Secret Obsession is on a par with Murder, She Wrote, Diagnosis Murder, or any other daytime TV show with 'murder' in the title, which has just struck me how psychopathic that was to expose a generation of elderly people to. The film is so cheap I was convinced an opening chase sequence would lead to a fake-out, ending with the victim waking up in a sweat, or an in-movie director shouting "cut!" as it's revealed we were on a movie set all along. It's another worrying sign of the content Netflix is curating. So was this TV movie-level rubbish dumped on Netflix, or dumped in the bins out back and somehow ended up on their servers? No I don't know how that would work either, but it makes more sense than the killer's plan.

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Review: It Chapter Two is a great bookend, but where's the tl;dr version?

Movie Review | Matt Looker | 3rd September 2019

2017’s It was such a huge success that it has reignited not only a demand for more Stephen King adaptations, but also a desire for high quality scares again. But there’s a downside to being the highest grossing horror film of all time - and I’m not talking about Pennywise making it harder for real-life clowns like Bongo Bonzo And Catty Watty Boom Boom (both local to me - I searched the directory) to find work. No, the downside is that, for this follow-up, the filmmaking team appear to have been left more unchecked. This sequel is far longer than it needs to be, far funnier than it makes sense to be and filled with so many meme-worthy visuals that it seems to have been made purely for Twitter retorts. In short, it’s an overlong carnival for the senses, and that’s in addition to Pennywise continuing to give clowns like Bongo Bonzo and Catty Watty a bad name.

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Review: The Great Hack will make you want to delete your Facebook account, data, self

Movie Review | Becky Suter | 4th August 2019

Facebook went downhill as soon as your mum signed up. The day she arrived with her Farmville requests and then started phoning you in the middle of a work day asking why you hadn't yet taken the "Which Shoe Are You?" personality quiz, it was in decline. And not just because it was irritating when she (or it could have been your dad, I don't know your family) would wish people a happy birthday by commenting on old posts they'd made about broken dishwashers five years ago, or confusing the search bar with their status update ("Ma Suter is tesco opening times christmas thank you"). It went downhill because she, and then the rest of us by default, put weapons into the hands of people who wanted to spark a culture war and now we cannot guarantee fair elections worldwide.

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