Jk Simmons

News, Reviews & Features
  • The Snowman

    Movie Review | Ali Gray | 12th October 2017

    Murder mysteries exist in a weird sort of critical stasis while you're watching them, because any story that hinges on an explosive final act reveal floats in limbo until it has shown its hand. Such a reveal - a surprise identity, a killer motive, a shock twist - may cause you to reassess everything you've already seen. The best films of the genre do just that: they cleverly subvert what you think you saw, fill in plot gaps you didn't know were there and, like a smug serial killer, flaunt the fact that they've been one step ahead of you the whole time. Yeah, The Snowman does not do any of that. You watch attentively and wait patiently and cross your legs and twiddle your thumbs but come the crushingly disappointing final act, the only dawning realisation you have is this: The Snowman is a bad movie and it turns out it had been all along. Twist!

  • Whiplash

    Movie Review | Ali Gray | 11th January 2015

    Sometimes a joke hits too close to the mark, and so it is I cannot ever listen to jazz music without thinking of The Fast Show sketch, Jazz Club, with its bowl-cutted host Louis Balfour introducing chin-stroker acts in straight trousers with names like Charlie ''The Bulb'' Robeson and Soylent Green. That's an entire musical genre desolated, for all time - an entire section of HMV I'll never trouble. But perhaps there is a saviour for jazz; not a musician, but a director, Damien Chazelle - a man who's probably too young to even remember The Fast Show, let alone the old duffers who made jazz insufferable in the first place. Trumpets please!

  • Up In The Air

    Movie Review | Kirsty | 14th January 2010

    Remember before pre-printed boarding passes, when you'd be queuing at check-in for 30 minutes, manically searching for your passport and tickets, only to have someone roll past you with their top-of-the line Samsonite holdall with dedicated laptop and "liquids" compartments, sail through first class check-in and security and be in their high-end Hertz hire cars before you even had your already dog-eared boarding pass in your sweaty little hand? Don't be too quick to envy their flashy suits and graphite members cards.

  • Burn After Reading

    Movie Review | Ali | 19th October 2008

    Just nine short months after No Country For Old Men was released to critical acclaim and just eight short months after it bagged the Best Picture Oscar (among others), the Coen brothers present a film that couldn't be more different in tone. There are similarities - like Llewelyn Moss, the central characters here are forced into...