Jon Hamm

News, Reviews & Features

Baby Driver

Movie Review | Matt Looker | 20th June 2017

I don’t envy Edgar Wright. I mean, I do, obviously. He’s stupidly talented, hangs out with cool Hollywood people and totally rocks the kind of facial hair you’d normally only see on a second-year arts grad student. But he is also under an awful lot of pressure to meet impossibly high expectations considering his relatively short film résumé. Think about it: two cult comedy classics, followed by the visually-impressive-but-niche Scott Pilgrim, and then a quick return to close off the Cornetto Trilogy. That’s it. Now everyone is ready to hail this new Edgar Wright movie as the champion of the summer, but what even IS an ‘Edgar Wright movie’?

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Minions

Movie Review | Ali Gray, Arthur Gray | 5th July 2015

I hold a special kind of contempt for people who indulge themselves in reviewing things that are blatantly not meant for them to enjoy; people who take pleasure in sticking the boot into something that is clearly aimed at a different demographic. I'm thinking the petulant one-star reviews of Kanye West's Glastonbury set, or Mark Kermode secretly enjoying giving the Entourage movie a kicking - everyone knows Kermode would rather stay at home watching The Exorcist with one hand in a pot of pomade and the other down his pants. You wouldn't send a Danny Dyer fan to review a Michael Haneke film, so why is the opposite true?

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Mad Men: season 7, episode 14 recap: "Person to Person"

TV Feature | Ed Williamson | 21st May 2015

As I've said more than once before, and will repeat endlessly until someone tells me how clever I am, Mad Men has chronicled the decade in which ideas first became commodities. Its ending demonstrates how the sixties were an age in which everyone had ideas all the time – Let's open a gallery in this old shed! Let's move to San Francisco and paint wooden eggs! – and how people gradually filtered out all this noise and made sense of it all.

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Mad Men: season 7, episode 13 recap: "The Milk and Honey Route"

TV Feature | Ed Williamson | 17th May 2015

Betty Francis took a lot of shit down the years, from her husbands, from her daughter and from Mad Men viewers insistent on judging her by contemporary standards of parenting and womanhood. Maybe she's due a reappraisal.

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Mad Men: season 7, episode 12 recap: "Lost Horizon"

TV Feature | Ed Williamson | 10th May 2015

Sometimes Mad Men makes me doubt my own intellect, something that usually happens only when I wake up and survey the remnants of a wholly unnecessary Dallas Chicken meal bought drunkenly the night before. But there lives an intellectual joust within the self on watching high-quality, subtext-laden TV. Am I getting it "right"? If I type my interpretations into Google, will I find others think the same, thereby validating me? Or if I announce them in public will I be scorned by my peers for missing the allegory? Well, this time I'm going for broke. "Lost Horizon" is all about God.

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Mad Men: season 7, episode 11 recap: "Time & Life"

TV Feature | Ed Williamson | 30th April 2015

Having confidently predicted last week that we were heading for a non-committal ending, inevitably I've mugged myself. Here, three episodes out, is the planet-killer. Don tells us this is the beginning of something, not the end, but the last time he told the truth was in about 1967 and it was only to tell Roger he couldn't pull off a kaftan.

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Mad Men: season 7, episode 10 recap: "The Forecast"

TV Feature | Ed Williamson | 23rd April 2015

"This place reeks of failure," says the realtor trying to sell Don's empty penthouse apartment. Finally, a way in which Don Draper and I share a similarity: I'd live happily enough in a flat with only garden furniture and a TV too. I'd use only paper plates and just throw them over the balcony when I'd finished eating.

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Mad Men: season 7, episode 9 recap: "New Business"

TV Feature | Ed Williamson | 16th April 2015

Megan's diary entry: "Got a million dollars off Don. Didn't have to have sex with Harry Crane. Best day of life so far by some stretch. Megan pour la victoire."

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Mad Men: season 7, episode 8 recap: "Severance"

TV Feature | Ed Williamson | 9th April 2015

The sixties are over, man. It's April 1970 and the Beatles are officially splitting up. Nixon is directing US troops to invade Cambodia. At the Kennedy Space Center the ground crew of the Apollo 13 are attempting to bring Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon and Bill Paxton safely back from space. Oh, and Don Draper's banging a diner waitress in an alley.

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Million Dollar Arm

Movie Review | Ed Williamson | 26th August 2014

The movies' use of sports as a metaphor for personal growth far outstrips the idea's efficacy in real life. Your team's against-the-odds victory in the Rumbelows Cup is unlikely to inspire a realisation that you have your priorities all wrong and lead to a marriage proposal to your long-suffering girlfriend.

But there's something in it. No, watching the snooker doesn't really mimic the ups and downs of real life, but there's a real euphoria and a despondency that sports can inspire, which can convince you momentarily that your life is amazing or terrible. Translate that to the big screen, framed around a guy who's learning to be a bit less self-centred or to pull himself out of a humdrum existence, and you've got yourself the template for a sports movie.

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