Jennifer Lawrence

News, Reviews & Features

Review: X-Men: Dark Phoenix is an unevolved end to a once super franchise

Movie Review | Matt Looker | 10th June 2019

So now the X-Men franchise comes to an end. Since that first ensemble movie was released 19 years ago, the property has launched 12 films (13, if you count the still-to-be-unshelved The New Mutants) and has not only become a staple of the superhero genre in the process, but helped set the template for how to do this kind of movie well. And here we have the last instalment; the final chapter that, surely, the entire saga has been working towards for nearly two decades: a fourth-film reboot set in an alternate timeline remaking the same story from the third film of the original movies. Itâ€™s the only conclusion weâ€™ve ever really wanted!

Read full article »
mother!

Movie Review | Ali Gray | 11th September 2017

I've had nightmares like mother!, proper sweat-drenched, bolt-upright air-gaspers that have left me shaken for hours. The ones where ordinary, mundane events turn hellish in an instant. The ones where your loved ones are there too but they're in on the bad juju, their blank faces betraying the feverish insanity you feel. Mother!, the new movie from Darren Aronofsky, is the closest a film has ever come to replicating one of those bad dreams; how quickly the drip-drip-drip of reason gushes into madness, how helpless we are in the face of our own demons and how it's always the ones we love that hurt us most. That exclamation mark in the title does not signify a comedy - it's the kind you see shortly before you plummet off a cliff.

Read full article »
Passengers

Movie Review | Ali Gray | 19th December 2016

Passengers is a sci-fi with an easily adaptable premise: what if, on the 120-year journey through space to colonise another planet, you were the only person on your spaceship to wake up? You can imagine dozens of versions of this movie. The Werner Herzog version is slow and considered and intimate and depressing and everyone dies. The Michael Bay version is huge and costs a billion dollars and has bikini models in zero gravity and it turns out the spaceship is evil. Nestling uncomfortably in the halfway point between the two is Morten Tyldum's Passengers, a shiny spin on Jon Spaihts' screenplay that can't decide if it's a blockbuster or a character piece and ends up being neither.

Read full article »
X-Men: Apocalypse

Movie Review | Ali Gray | 19th May 2016

Forgive me for sounding like I'm on the company payroll, but have Marvel movies ruined superhero movies for everyone else? I fear they have. The Marvel Cinematic Universe made its own space in the superhero sphere; it owns the area marked 'fun'. DC, as a countermeasure to all the lousy fun everyone was enjoying, staked their claim on the 'serious' space; heroes with grim faces carved out of rock, pre-tantrum lip-wobble expressions lashed with rain. Where does this leave the X-Men? I'm sure I don't know anymore, because X-Men: Apocalypse attempts to be all things to all people and ends up being neither overtly fun or remotely serious, just entirely ridiculous. It feels like a superhero movie back from when no one really knew what that was supposed to mean, or, as a friend of mine put it so perfectly: "It's like a shit superhero movie from the nineties".

Read full article »
Film starring Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence somehow gets greenlight

Movie Feature | Matt Looker | 17th June 2015

Sometimes I just don't understand Hollywood.

Read full article »
Advertise with us!
X-Men: Days Of Future Past

Movie Review | Matt Looker | 13th May 2014

Have you seen all of the X-Men films? Including the First Class prequel and both Wolverine movies? AND all of the mid-credits and post-credits stings that were tagged on to the end? Good. Then you may proceed. Welcome to X-Men: Retcon. I hope you've been paying attention.

Read full article »
12 Years A Slave cruelly snubbed at 2014 MTV Movie Awards

Movie News | Ali Gray | 14th April 2014

Steve McQueen's Oscar-winning drama 12 Years A Slave was snubbed by esteemed MTV movie critics last night. Though it was nominated for Movie Of The Year, it was beaten by The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. Nominated star Chiwetel Ejiofor went home empty-handed, with the Best Male Performance awarded to industry veteran Josh Hutcherson for The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. Oscar-winning newcomer Lupita Nyong'o also missed out, with Best Female Performance going to Jennifer Lawrence for The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. To cap a miserable evening for Steve McQueen's movie, Chiwetel Ejiofor wasn't even nominated for Best Shirtless Performance.

Read full article »
Eight astonishing things on the new X-Men: Days Of Future Past poster

Movie Feature | Ali Gray | 24th March 2014

The X-Men don't historically have a lot of luck when it comes to cool poster designs - who could forget 9/3/11? - and that trend continues with this mental new one-sheet for X-Men: Days Of Future Past. Featuring: ALL OF THE THINGS.

Read full article »
American Hustle

Movie Review | Neil Alcock | 7th December 2013

American Hustle does not fuck about setting out its stall. Its first glorious image is of a pudgy Christian Bale in a bathroom mirror, his face sheltering beneath a jacked-up haystack of atrocious seventies hair, methodically and painstakingly attempting to sculpt his ludicrous combover into a presentable form. It's immediately hilarious and tragic, and tells us that what we're about to watch is concerned with appearances, deceit, aspiration, unfathomable fashion choices and hair. Lots of hair.

Read full article »
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

Movie Review | Matt Looker | 19th November 2013

So now we arrive at the second film of the latest mega-successful young-adult-novel-turned-movie-franchise and this is where things can get tricky. It's easy enough to come up with an initial concept - boy goes to wizard school, girl falls in love with vampire, etc - but following it up with the beginnings of an epic saga? Much harder to do. Thankfully though, this sequel manages to accomplish just that, successfully furthering the story and delving deeper into the politics and ethical quandaries laid out by its predecessor. All this despite being - for the most part - basically the same film.

Read full article »

Support Us

We are now using Patreon to cover some of our hosting fees. So if you like our brand of "content" and would like to see us do more, please consider chucking a few digital pennies our way by clicking on the link below. Thanks!