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News, Reviews & Features

A special Shiznit investigation: which food is acceptable to eat on a train?

Movie Feature | Ali Gray | 1st October 2018

Earlier this week, an unforeseen event shocked me to my very core. My good friend and colleague Matthew Looker, a professional and a family man, contacted me to inform me of some most distressing news, and he had pictorial evidence: a woman on his packed commuter train home had begun eating a whole melon with a spoon. Not melon chunks, you understand. An entire, spherical melon. No sooner had the perpetrator finished carving the guts out of the melon, satisfying her own perverted craving for flesh, she began carving up a second melon. The carnage was only contained when the carcasses of the large fruits were stored in a Tupperware lunchbox and removed from the theatre of conflict. Regardless, it was clear: the rules had changed, and none of us in the Banter Squad group chat would ever be the same again.

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Review: The Meg is too toothless to take a bite out of Jaws' legacy

Movie Review | Becky Suter | 11th August 2018

To borrow a phrase from Love Island, on paper The Meg has it all: Jason Statham is on the hunt for the biggest shark ever known, tracks it down and then probably punches it in the face or something. But as we all know, what's good on paper doesn't necessarily translate to real life (see: Dr Alex). Lacking any sense of plot, direction or tasty big shark action scenes, The Meg is lost at sea and sinks faster that a decomposing cetacean carcass. We're going to need a bigger boat.

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The Commuter

Movie Review | Ali Gray | 18th January 2018

Every January, Liam Neeson is parachuted into the mid-awards season slump, his brand of no-nonsense, cut-and-dried-in-90-minutes action thrills the perfect antidote to sludgy Oscar bait and the subsequent melange of self-consuming hot takes. His enemies are not the vaguely Eastern European drug dealers and criminals he fights on screen; his real opponents are Frances McDormand, Timothée Chalamet, Greta Gerwig. We cannot overlook the importance of having trashy movies exist alongside important movies: films like The Commuter are crucial to balance out the cinematic chi. Though Neeson's latest run-and-gunner will come and go in a single weekend, leaving nary a trace until he releases the exact same movie next January, it is an essential addition to your awards season watchlist. The Commuter should not be Taken 4: Granted.

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The Girl On The Train

Movie Review | Ed Williamson | 7th October 2016

Here's Emily Blunt on the Girl on the Train poster, looking suspiciously like she has more make-up on than she does in the actual film (again). She's very much the best thing about it, but still: if there's one genre for which I have a soft spot, it's the serviceable but unexceptional thriller.

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No one told Bruce Willis we're not doing casual Friday any more

Movie News | Ali Gray | 28th June 2014

We all know Bruce Willis stopped caring about his movies about two Die Hards ago, but he could at least have worn a shirt and tie for the poster shoot. The Prince gets minus poster points for the unnecessary helicopter and the mysterious sparks. Also because it looks like it was made in a lunch break. Which, coincidentally, is when Bruce Willis filmed his cameo.

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Poster upgrade: How To Train Your Dragon 2's poster #selfie

Movie Feature | Ali Gray | 7th May 2014

DreamWorks have released a new poster for How To Train Your Dragon 2 in which they've attempted to squeeze every single character - man and beast - onto a single one-sheet. The final composition seemed quite familiar to me so I decided to fire up Photoshop and fill in the blanks.

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The Croods

Movie Review | Rob | 20th March 2013

The Croods raises some interesting questions. Such as: where can I find me some giant corncobs? What's up with that flying tortoise/parrot thing? Is it weird to be attracted to an animalistic red-headed cave girl who runs on all fours? And why can’t I stop staring at that dude's distractingly convincing CGI nipples? At least, these were my thoughts upon leaving the screening of this film. I hope for their sake that the children in attendance weren’t thinking the same as me.

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Hesher

Movie Review | Ali | 5th March 2012

Earlier this year on one of my weekly trips to Amazon to buy DVDs I definitely don't need, I stumbled across a film that I've been waiting to hit UK cinemas for years now. Spencer Sussman's black comedy Hesher was the talk of the festival circuit in 2010, but now finds itself ungamely shunted onto DVD shelves without so much as an apologetic press release. No film starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Oscar-winner Natalie Portman (star of "The Black Swan" according to the DVD cover) and Rainn Wilson deserves such a fate: Hesher deserves more than one of Matt's DVD round-ups ("I haven't seen it, but...") so here's my review in full.

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Super

Movie Review | Matt | 7th July 2011

We’ve had Thor, X-Men: First Class and Green Lantern already this year, showing us that the ‘comic-book movie’ is showing no signs of hanging up its cape. So a film that explores what it’s like to actually become a superhero in the real world is a refreshingly interesting take on the genre, isn’t it? Well, you wouldn’t think so in this post-Kick-Ass world, but Super is surprisingly great thanks to being even more realistic-ier.

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Late obit for Zippy, George and Dalek

TV News | Matt Looker | 10th June 2011

The death of voice actor Roy Skelton has rendered Rainbow’s Zippy and George, as well as a few Daleks, literally speechless. Oh what? What?

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