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News, Reviews & Features

Aftermath

Movie Review | Ed Williamson | 12th April 2017

Arnold Schwarzenegger is in a film in which he plays a character who unaccountably talks like Arnold Schwarzenegger, so all's well with the world. But you begin to realise after a while that there's a reason why this isn't usually so much of a problem: it's that most of his films are a bit daft, and realism isn't why you turned over to ITV4, so you just shrug and go with it. But Aftermath isn't daft: it's dead serious. Oh heck.

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Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them

Movie Review | Matt Looker | 6th December 2016

At a time when every superhero, toy, 80s cartoon character, board game and emoji are fighting for enough space at the box office to create their own movie 'universe', J.K. Rowling's work is already done. Her wizarding world of Harry Potter is well established and still ripe for further exploration, which is pretty much the perfect environment in which to churn out money-making tie-in movies of lesser returns. And yet, instead, a far greater challenge has been undertaken: birthing an entirely new franchise of films set within the same universe. Somehow, audiences are going to have to get invested in a new story that - we can assume - will never be as important as the one we have already seen. So those beasts had better be pretty bloody fantastic.

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Doctor Strange

Movie Review | Ali Gray | 3rd November 2016

Considering the X-Men movies can't even stay consistent one movie to the next, it's a minor miracle the Marvel Cinematic Universe remains a cohesive whole, 8 years and 14 movies after Nick Fury first asked Tony Stark to join his professional LinkedIn network. We've had men of technology, beasts of rage, Gods from other realms and soldiers forged in war, all now reading from the same script. The latest recruit to the MCU is Doctor Strange, who heralds the arrival of the world of magic, but - like Arrested Development's Gob Bluth and his Alliance of Magicians - demands to be taken seriously. Disbelief is being suspended at a comfortable level by now: if you're cool with purple space tyrants and talking raccoons, chances are the addition of sorcerers, supreme or otherwise, isn't going to upset the apple cart.

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Black Mass

Movie Review | Ed Williamson | 4th December 2015

There are a couple of premises on which Black Mass relies in lieu of a unique selling point. One is the idea, mainly established by marketing over the years, that a radical physical transformation for a role equals a daring and probably great performance. The other is that the audience's familiarity with the structure of the real-life gangster movie is enough to justify doing it all over again. Both are fallacies, and neither is enough to make it sparkle.

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Big Hero 6

Movie Review | TheShiznit.co.uk | 25th January 2015

If you want an example of how our relationship with technology has accelerated at a terrifying rate, show a young millennial the first Toy Story movie, which turns 20 years old this year. Made in 1995, the first fully CG-animated movie was a cinematic landmark yet it was still, tellingly, a tale of simple toys and derring do. That millennial you roped in (I won't asked questions how) will now look at Toy Story and turn their nose up at the relatively rudimentary visuals; they're much more likely to get their kicks from a movie like Big Hero 6, a breathlessly exciting, migraine-inducingly busy animation that must have surely pushed the Disney render farms to meltdown. Purely from a technological standpoint, it makes Toy Story look like a Punch & Judy show.

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The Missing: season one

TV Review | Ed Williamson | 17th December 2014

You could look at The Missing two ways, I suppose. Either it was ultimately about what happened to the kid or about what his disappearance did to his parents. The latter was more interesting to me but the finale tried a bit too hard to satisfy on both counts, letting them cancel each other out in the end. (Spoilers.)

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Get On Up

Movie Review | Ed Williamson | 20th November 2014

Pop star biopics don't really work, do they? They love to take great, heavy-handed pains to hint at the inspiration behind the subject's most famous work, like a whole film comprising Forrest Gump telling John Lennon how in China the people have no possessions, and no religion too. Get On Up, the story of James Brown, isn't quite as guilty of this as most, and boasts a standout lead performance by Chadwick Boseman, but by Christ, its script is funky, and not in a good way.

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Hey Christian Bale, would you say your performance in Exodus is OTT?

Movie Trailer | Ali Gray | 1st October 2014

Good to know, thanks dude! The new trailer for Ridley Scott's Exodus: Gods And Kings is below, with Welshman Christian Bale playing Egyptian prophet Moses and Australian Joel Edgerton as pharaoh Ramesses II. Oh Hollywood, how is it that this isn't even weird any more?

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Top 10 films of our lifetime #5: Scott Pilgrim Vs The World

Movie Feature | Ali Gray | 22nd September 2014

Like you, I was very disappointed to see that Edgar Wright decided to part ways with Marvel and Ant-Man, because he's a director who is capable of doing wonderful things with a camera; the combination of Edgar Wright, Paul Rudd and the Marvel universe made me feel a little giddy. Still, I can take comfort in the fact that he's basically already made a superhero movie in Scott Pilgrim Vs The World, and not only that, he had Beck provide the tunes. Ant-Man Shmant-Man - Ali.

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A Walk Among The Tombstones

Movie Review | Ed Williamson | 20th September 2014

There comes a point where you just have to say, OK: we've got enough single-minded vigilante killing machines in cinema. We don't need another. That point for me was the three weeks between seeing A Walk Among The Tombstones and The Equalizer, more of which next week. Liam Neeson's latest is much like a lot of his other post-Taken output: you don't need it particularly, but it's there and it does what it's supposed to.

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