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News, Reviews & Features-
Review: The Witcher is the fantasy bobbins you never knew you needed
TV Review | Luke Whiston | 8th January 2020
"Cheap. Fast. Good. Pick two." So goes that old maxim of the creative world. I guess what they didn't mean was "pick two things and bludgeon them into the triangle of choice with the nearest rock while screaming at it to make sense" - the two things in the case of Netflix's adaptation of The Witcher being a hollowed out Game of Thrones where we're parachuted into the lore with no explanation and left to fend for ourselves, and blinkered '90s after-school spellcasting greenscreen of death Knightmare. The result being a foul-mouthed mess that somehow defies all cynical attempts to bring it down.
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Review: The Wandering Earth seeks to save the planet but rings hollow
Movie Review | Luke Whiston | 31st May 2019
Think of the most outlandish thing you can think of. Now imagine it bigger. No, bigger than that. Think the Wright Brothers diving into the Trench Run. Bigger. Think Nikola Tesla wielding Mjolnir in a duel with Edison. Bigger! Elon Musk smoking weed on Mars in a mech. Bigger still, dammit! Ok, now take whatever mental image you've arrived at and multiply it by ten, then run into a wall to give yourself a concussion. Congratulations you are now somewhere close to the wild, inspirational, childish ambition of The Wandering Earth.
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Review: Game of Thrones bows out burning bridges, own fingers, everything
TV Review | Luke Whiston | 21st May 2019
So now that the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Game of Thrones are at an end - two of the most popular, costliest and consistently epic franchises to ever exist in film and TV - and we've chewed over when and how to talk about them online, are we at some kind of 'spoiler event horizon' or a 'spoiler singularity'? I don't know either, just wanted to say something that sounded clever. Tits and willies and dragons eh, cor!
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It Was Fifty Years Ago Today! The Beatles: Sgt Pepper & Beyond
Movie Review | Ed Williamson | 29th May 2017
Where Ron Howard's Eight Days a Week ends, as the teenage screams die down after the last chord struck at Candlestick Park, Alan G Parker's new documentary begins. Timed to coincide with Sgt Pepper's fiftieth anniversary and hoping to catch the wave of tributes and looks-back that will go along with it, it takes us from the end of Beatlemania into the start of the studio years and through the recording of their most significant album. And it doesn't come near to doing it justice.
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The Beatles: Eight Days A Week – The Touring Years
Movie Review | Ed Williamson | 16th September 2016
What a Beatles documentary has never quite captured is their cultural significance. You can't, not really: it is too tightly bound up in everything we hold as self-evident about popular culture and our relationship with celebrity. Ron Howard, having had the sense to focus his film on the touring years up until 1966 rather than compress The Beatles Anthology into two hours, allows us a window into just how mental those four years were, and gets closer to the truth of it than anyone else has managed.
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The Conjuring 2: The Enfield Case
Movie Review | Matt Looker | 14th June 2016
There is a superb moment of unintentional hilarity in Conjuring 2. Vera Farmiga's spirit medium wakes up in the morning to discover husband Patrick Wilson painting at an easel. "Did you suddenly feel inspired?" she asks tenderly. "I wouldn't call it inspiration exactly. It's just an image I haven't been able to get out of my head all morning" he nonchalantly replies, before turning the easel around to reveal a perfect close-up portrait of an evil demon nun with glowy eyes and fangs.
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Spooks: The Greater Good
Movie Review | Matt Looker | 29th April 2015
Spooks The TV Show was always a cut above regular television. Each of its 10 series was densely plotted with subterfuge, moral dilemmas and shock deaths, but even if you immediately lost track of the complicated details within, you could still enjoy the tension, twists and conspiracies at a surface level. But how does that all translate to the big screen for Spooks The Movie? Do we have a Hollywoodised version with airborne car chases and a Jay-Z soundtrack? Nah. All that we have here is really just more of the same. The question is: is that necessarily a bad thing?
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The Salvation
Movie Review | Ed Williamson | 22nd April 2015
Now that everything is at least 140 minutes long, I applaud any film that does its thing for an hour and a half, gets the job done then fucks off home. The content of those 90 minutes is irrelevant really. It could be a dead goose for an hour then a man eating a Bounty for the rest. So well done, The Salvation, Danish western that you somehow are, for not hanging around too long. And for being generally all right in a forgettable sort of a way, too.
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Live-blog: Peter Jackson's entire Middle Earth saga marathon
Movie Feature | Matt Looker | 20th April 2015
The Hobbit: The Battle Of The Five Armies is released today on DVD and Blu-ray meaning that we can all finally enjoy, not just the Hobbit trilogy, but Peter Jackson's entire Tolkien saga in our own homes. So who wants to join me in a movie marathon that could end up outlasting time itself?
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Testament Of Youth
Movie Review | Matt Looker | 16th January 2015
Vera Brittain's Testament Of Youth is considered to be one of the most important war memoirs ever published, a tragic real-life tale of love, loss and the atrocities of war. Its depiction of the impact of World War I on the women left behind as their men joined the army, not to mention the middle classes in general, is taught in schools both as a vital historical document and as a valuable piece of feminist literature. So bear with me while I try to criticise this film without sounding like a cynical, sexist Nazi.
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