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News, Reviews & Features

Review: Rim of the World walks a fine line between stupid and clever

Movie Review | Luke Whiston | 18th June 2019

McG's (ugh) Netflix Original (UGH) Rim of the World (UGHHHH) is a sexist, misogynistic, inexplicably racist low-hanging-fruit-picking embarrassment that by rights should be shot into the sun and every trace of its existence burnt to ashes, and the people responsible sterilised so they don't accidentally send their kids to Hollywood film school and make another one like it. That would be if the sexism, misogynism and racism wasn't being delivered by 13-year-old children. Which I'm afraid in the arena of bad taste qualifies this for some sort of filmic equivalent of the Nobel Prize.

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Review: The Silence echoes better films, but you'll watch it anyway

Movie Review | Luke Whiston | 29th April 2019

I feel like I've decoded the Voynich manuscript. Something seemed off about The Silence but for the longest time I couldn't put my finger on it. It's a noticeably cheap-looking film - a continuation of the worrying Netflix trend of picking things up that are, shall we say, 'Poundland versions of proper films' - but has a decent enough cast. The intrigue deepened. So I looked it up and suddenly everything fell into place: it was written by Shane and Carey Van Dyke of the Van Dyke dynasty, purveyors of the infamously terrible Asylum 'mockbusters' which were funny for five minutes in 2006. I don't know exactly how these things work with a dozen production companies and distributors and whatnot, but I do know what Netflix have done here is they've rebadged a film that was probably destined for The SyFy Channel. And as everyone knows you can't polish a turd. Believe me I've tried, it goes everywhere.

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Discussion: Impossible - Mission: Impossible II (2000)

Movie Feature | Ali Gray, Matt Looker, Becky Suter, Ed Williamson | 18th July 2018

This doesn't really need an introduction. We're talking about all the Mission: Impossible movies. Online. It says so in the title. Just get on with it. Today on Discussion: Impossible: it's Mission: Impossible II! Before we start, I must insist you all open this window and have this music playing in the background to set the scene and take you back to a very specific, very terrible time and place.

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The First Purge

Movie Review | Ali Gray | 6th July 2018

The Purge is an odd, scrappy sort of franchise that's stumbled clumsily into the zeitgeist without so much as taking its mask off. The first movie, released in 2013 in the middle of the Obama administration, was a high concept home invasion thriller that preyed on the fears of suburban white folk, starring Ethan Hawke, the most Caucasian man in the observable universe. Now, after five years, two sequels and one particularly flatulent Trump, The Purge has flipped its racial politics completely: starring an almost total African-American cast, prequel The First Purge has aligned itself with black fears of a government out to extinguish them. It’s quite the position for a low-budget horror movie to take (studio Blumhouse were also behind Get Out, another racially charged genre picture that blew up), but this prequel never quite fulfills its brief of winding back the clock to ask why America felt the urge to purge in the first place.

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Pottersville

Movie Review | Luke Whiston | 28th December 2017

You think a Christmas movie where Michael Shannon is mistaken for Bigfoot sounds weird? You don’t know the half of it. And trust me, you don’t want to know the rest. Unless you do, in which case that’s cool, we’re all friends here. I’m being purposefully vague because, well you’ll see... Let’s just say the internet has a lot to answer for.

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The Snowman

Movie Review | Ali Gray | 12th October 2017

Murder mysteries exist in a weird sort of critical stasis while you're watching them, because any story that hinges on an explosive final act reveal floats in limbo until it has shown its hand. Such a reveal - a surprise identity, a killer motive, a shock twist - may cause you to reassess everything you've already seen. The best films of the genre do just that: they cleverly subvert what you think you saw, fill in plot gaps you didn't know were there and, like a smug serial killer, flaunt the fact that they've been one step ahead of you the whole time. Yeah, The Snowman does not do any of that. You watch attentively and wait patiently and cross your legs and twiddle your thumbs but come the crushingly disappointing final act, the only dawning realisation you have is this: The Snowman is a bad movie and it turns out it had been all along. Twist!

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Secret perks of being a Rotten Tomatoes approved film critic

Movie Feature | Ali Gray | 31st July 2017

Everyone knows Rotten Tomatoes, the review-aggregator website that tells you whether a movie is rubbish or brilliant. But what exactly does it mean to become a Rotten Tomatoes-approved publication? What power does it give you? What perks does it afford, apart from the obvious increase in pheromones that attract the opposite sex? Join us as we lay bare the secret perks of being Tomatometer-approved.

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It Comes At Night

Movie Review | Becky Suter | 7th July 2017

The real monsters are inside us, you know. For example, there’s a demon that lives inside of me that comes out after approximately 3 glasses of Chilean chardonnay. Aside from my semi-serious drinking problem, It Comes At Night teaches us that any external creepy threats are nothing compared to the horrors at home. Yeah, think on that.

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Alien: Covenant

Movie Review | Ali Gray | 11th May 2017

By rights, the Alien franchise should be dead by now, all curled up on its back like a big dead spider, flambéed by the flamethrower of critical ire. How many other movie series would be allowed so many misses and still get invited back to the plate for another swing? Throughout its various iterations since the 90s - sequels, prequels, versus match-ups - the Alien franchise has succeeded only in corroding its own legacy. Even 2012's promising Prometheus, directed by franchise progenitor Ridley Scott, fell short of expectations thanks to its entire cast suffering total frontal lobotomies in the third act. Well, the rot stops here. In Alien: Covenant, Ridley Scott has directed the best Alien movie of the past 30 years, and although that isn't exactly a glowing compliment, know this: not only does Covenant deliver a payload of short, sharp scares and atmosphere in spades, it course-corrects the franchise as a whole, retroactively making Prometheus feel like a better movie too.

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Eight questions I had after the Big Little Lies finale

TV Feature | Becky Suter | 26th April 2017

LittleBigPicture presents its #hottake on the final episode of Big Little Lies, a mere 48 hours after it aired in the UK. After seven weeks of speculation, we finally found out who the murder victim and murderer at Trivia Night were, but many questions were left unanswered, such as ...

(BTW, it goes without saying: there are spoilers ahead.)

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