Nicholas Hoult

News, Reviews & Features
  • Review: X-Men: Dark Phoenix is an unevolved end to a once super franchise

    Movie Review | Matt Looker | 10th June 2019

    So now the X-Men franchise comes to an end. Since that first ensemble movie was released 19 years ago, the property has launched 12 films (13, if you count the still-to-be-unshelved The New Mutants) and has not only become a staple of the superhero genre in the process, but helped set the template for how to do this kind of movie well. And here we have the last instalment; the final chapter that, surely, the entire saga has been working towards for nearly two decades: a fourth-film reboot set in an alternate timeline remaking the same story from the third film of the original movies. It’s the only conclusion we’ve ever really wanted!

  • X-Men: Apocalypse

    Movie Review | Ali Gray | 19th May 2016

    Forgive me for sounding like I'm on the company payroll, but have Marvel movies ruined superhero movies for everyone else? I fear they have. The Marvel Cinematic Universe made its own space in the superhero sphere; it owns the area marked 'fun'. DC, as a countermeasure to all the lousy fun everyone was enjoying, staked their claim on the 'serious' space; heroes with grim faces carved out of rock, pre-tantrum lip-wobble expressions lashed with rain. Where does this leave the X-Men? I'm sure I don't know anymore, because X-Men: Apocalypse attempts to be all things to all people and ends up being neither overtly fun or remotely serious, just entirely ridiculous. It feels like a superhero movie back from when no one really knew what that was supposed to mean, or, as a friend of mine put it so perfectly: "It's like a shit superhero movie from the nineties".

  • Mad Max: Fury Road, 2015's best film by a thousand miles

    Movie Review | Ali Gray | 31st December 2015

    I actually watched Mad Max: Fury Road in its week of release, but it was such an overwhelming experience it's taken me all of seven months to mentally unpack it all, like when someone emails you a crazy big zip file which basically nerfs your inbox and you can't do anything until it's properly downloaded. That, with writing. Anyway. This is the best film of the year by a very long stretch, I'm off to watch it again because it got it on Blu-ray for Christmas and oh you've already stopped reading.

  • Kill Your Friends

    Movie Review | Ed Williamson | 6th November 2015

    I read the NME quite a lot as a younger man, when they had proper bands with normal trousers and songs with choruses, but I never knew what an 'A&R man' was. On the basis of Kill Your Friends it must stand for Amoral & R... retributive? Ha! No, come to think of it you wouldn't have that as your job title; it wouldn't make any sense, particularly on a full industrial scale. What would your job description even be? I haven't thought this through at all. Ooh look, a film.

  • Jack The Giant Slayer

    Movie Review | Rob | 22nd March 2013

    Having grown up in a small, middle-class Conservative-voting Cambridgeshire village, I’ve seen enough poorly-acted productions of Jack and The Beanstalk to know when something isn’t quite right. And "Fe-fi-fo-fum, ask not whence the thunder comes" isn't quite right.

  • This picture just made me realise Warm Bodies is Twilight-ish

    Movie News | Ali | 3rd November 2011

    There I was, minding my own business, reading a book about zombies, when BAM - the first picture of Warm Bodies: The Movie. Pale skin, a warm embrace, a supernatural romance, hair... Did I just enjoy something in the same genre as Twilight? UH OH.

  • X-Men: First Class

    Movie Review | Matt | 25th May 2011

    With Brett ‘The Hitman’ Ratner killing off half the characters in X-Men: The Last Stand, it’s no surprise that the franchise had to be rebooted, but do we really need to see a Bash Street Kids version of the mutant superheroes? And what can it tell us that we don’t already know? Well, how about the fact that Magneto used to be a globe-trotting Bond-a-like and Xavier was a beer-chugging ladies man? Admit it, Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart suddenly seem much more interesting…

  • X-Men First Class: a guide to sitting

    Movie Feature | Ali | 17th May 2011

    Worried X-Men: First Class might be too exciting? Let Professor Xavier and his mutant brethren show you how to relax in style.

  • A Single Man

    Movie Review | Anna | 16th February 2010

    Did everyone in the 1960s walk around with perfectly bouffanted hair, expertly lined eyes, a martini glass poised in one hand and a cigarette hanging artfully from the other, chattering about the Cuban missile crisis? We, the modern audience, would like to think so and Tom Ford is only too happy to indulge us. Consequently, A Single Man has an unreal, dreamlike quality to it - this is life through a Vaseline smeared lens, the 1960s as seen in a vintage Vogue magazine.