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News, Reviews & Features

Review: Rebecca is an uninspired case of diminishing returns

Movie Review | Luke Whiston | 26th October 2020

Here are a couple of film facts you can use to impress your TikTok audience: Die Hard is a Christmas movie, and John Carpenter's The Thing is a remake. Wait, one of the most awesome movies ever is a copy of another film? Well no, not exactly: Carpenter took an old story and improved it, adding his own ideas and explosions, and generally raising everything up a notch. Okay, so what's your point? That it is possible to create legitimate new art from old art. Oh right, is it worth obsessing over? Not really. Are you going to anyway? Yes, after this dab.

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Review: Hubie Halloween is a sorry excuse for a film, but don't expect an apology

Movie Review | Luke Whiston | 12th October 2020

It was cruel, really - to give us a glimpse of an oft-quoted character from Adam Sandler's greatest creation, Happy Gilmore, and then to undo any hint a comedy of that calibre would be in store mere seconds later when the funny voices and scat humour kicked in. And this is a film obsessed with scat: farts, poo, piss, it's got it all. Which is apt, because I've never seen anything go to shit as quickly as Hubie Halloween.

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Review: The Peanut Butter Falcon is more than a silly nammm peanut butter

Movie Review | Luke Whiston | 10th September 2020

What cultural works wouldn't be improved with the addition of wrestling? Imagine John David Washington's Tenet protagonist performing a reverse suplex... in reverse! Or Queequeg acting as a hype man for Captain Ahab in Moby Dick. Or the Little Women charging towards the ring one by one in a furious royal rumble. Bargain Hunt cage match. See? There's a whole genre there waiting to be discovered. This is going somewhere.

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Review: Marriage Story battles for the high ground but risks sanctimony

Movie Review | Luke Whiston | 31st December 2019

Relationships are weird. You come to them as a pair of individuals, both trying to find common threads while maintaining individuality. Then you move in together and over time adjust to each other's idiosyncrasies, forming new habits based on a shared life, until one day you realise you're a completely different person. Later if you decide to wave goodbye to sleep for about fifteen years by having children it adds an adorable layer of walking on eggshells to proceedings. The only way to really make it work is to be totally open about your thoughts and feelings - keeping secrets is just asking for trouble - so if/when things fall apart and you're held to account for your part in the failure you get to gloat over that deceitful snake (just kidding, honey - L for Love!).

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Review: Dolemite Is My Name is a rose-tinted celebration of flawed ambition

Movie Review | Luke Whiston | 5th November 2019

Is Eddie Murphy back? Judging by the last few months he's made a great deal of effort to distance himself from his 1980s sexism-laced standup routines, so he's definitely trying to come back. You can be cynical about it and say this is housekeeping in an attempt to reinvent his image for the new age of woke comedy, or you can accept he's genuinely trying to make amends and move onwards and upwards together into Liberal PC Heaven, where there are no guns and all the Pokemon you can catch. Whatever it is I'm not sure the best way to do it is via a celebration of blaxploitation; a genre laced with sexism.

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Review: El Camino is a familiar dose that goes down easy (drugs)

Movie Review | Luke Whiston | 27th October 2019

It would make absolutely no difference to anything whether Breaking Bad spin-off movie El Camino existed or not. If in a few years' time show creator Vince Gilligan responded to a fan question at a Comic Con panel with his plan for Jesse instead, the cultural impact would be much the same. That said, Gilligan can direct the hell out of the world he created and this re-visit is a reminder of the show's absorbing style, and of one of the central tenets of Bad: how much chaos can one person cause?

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Review: The Laundromat is a quick spin with spotty results

Movie Review | Luke Whiston | 24th October 2019

It sucks that there are people in the world whose only goal is the pursuit of wealth without any thought for the human cost, and that these people live lives of fabulous opulence we could only imagine while poverty exists, but that's the natural result of a society based on capitalism. I mean, we're all like it to some extent - we've got to pay the bills and put food on the table, and the goose game on Nintendo Switch isn't going to buy itself - but those who possess the ability to hoard more money than they could ever spend are equipped to rise to the top of the heap at our expense. It's a maddening situation, although if pushed I'd say I was more angry about geese right now. That seems like a problem I could solve. Forget billionaires; we need to kill all the geese.

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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: 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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Men In Black: International was released and every critic made the same joke

Movie Feature | Matt Looker | 8th July 2019

Attention filmmakers! If your movie franchise contains a unique narrative device that also serves as easy ammunition for critics to use in the event of a bad review, don't kid yourselves that they'll rise above it. They'll latch on to that reference like it's a personal gift from you to them. Thank you, they'll say. Thank you for making our jobs and deadlines easy. Because that's what good film reviews should be. Easy.

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