Review: The Firm

"We come in peace, we leave you in pieces," says Gary Oldman's Bex in the 1988 original version of The Firm, and you believed it. Oldman played the vicious character in this made-for-TV movie with such the right degree of humour and venom that it still remains one of his best performances.

He owns the role throughout and, as dated as the film now appears, Oldman is still captivating. So here's the question: how do you remake a Gary Oldman movie without Gary Oldman?

Review: Public Enemies

On paper, this movie has it all. A credit crunch-defying story about renegades sticking it to the money men. A mouth-watering A-list face-off between two of the coolest bastards on the planet. A director who couldn't direct a shitty shoot-out if Michael Bay had him at gun-point. Why, then, does it feel so lacking? Despite all th...

Review: The Last House On The Left

There's something off-putting about the current brand of horror remakes. The movies that are being refitted from the seventies and eighties are ones whose names still resonate today, due to the controversy they caused at the time (see: The Hills Have Eyes, Friday The 13th, Texas Chainsaw Massacre etc.) But the so-called 'video n...

Review: Observe And Report

Another month, another mall cop comedy. Or is it? The trailer does show current King of Comedy Seth Rogen sporting his shortest haircut ever, lusting over Anna Faris and kicking seven shades of shit out of pesky skateboarding yobs in quite the comical fashion. But look a little closer and Observe And Report is a disturbing study...

Review: Friday The 13th

“Remakes? Pah!” Before you spit with indignation, remember it's kind of hard to besmirch the legacy of a slasher series that boasts ten awful sequels thus far. In fact, a Friday The 13th remake is one of the safest bets imaginable, and paired with a release date nobody's likely to forget – the day before Valentine's, no less – t...

Review: Taken

Ah, the French. They know how to do so many things well – runny cheese, red wine, yacht-based film festivals and so on. Now they can add kidnap capers to that list. Taken, co-written by Luc Besson and directed by District B13’s Pierre Morel, is a fast, taut and remarkably enjoyable thriller which is refreshingly free of twisty r...

Review: JCVD

A re-animated corpse in Universal Soldier. A cloned serial killer in Replicant. A time-travelling cop in, er, Timecop. The Muscles from Brussels has played a lot of out-there characters in his 25-year career, but in his new movie, Jean-Claude Van Damme faces his toughest role yet: himself. And no, he's not fighting his evil twin...

Review: Underworld: Rise Of The Lycans

"Oh Lucian, Lucian, wherefore art thou, a stinky bloody-thirsty werewolf?" You know the story: boy meets girl, boy is werewolf, girl is vampire, boy loves girl, everybody dies. That’s essentially the plot for Underworld’s third outing, whose tagline could have read: "Romeo and Juliet for the Dark Ages." Vampires and werewolve...

Top 50 Best Movie Deaths

Movie deaths are an integral part of the filmmaker's arsenal. Can you imagine how dull flicks would be without the occasional fatality, assassination or cheeky moider? They offer a chance for imagination and inventiveness and have given the creators of the Saw series an outlet that has probably stopped them going on a killing sp...

Review: My Bloody Valentine 3D

A few months back, I reviewed a film called Scar 3D. It sucked, not only because it was a terrible movie, but because it was a terrible waste of genuinely exciting technology – 3D specs have been around for yonks, but it's only now that films are being /shot/ in three dimensions. Aside from a cool scene with 3D tits, I argued th...