It’s quiz time! Get your buzzers ready and let the tedium take you down an inescapable river! This week we’ve got antiheroes – my favourite archetype, of course. Where would we be without antiheroes? Still stuck with the typical, boring good guy? That would be sad. But luckily, cynical, immoral, sociopathic and cold hearted cowards […]
Quiz: Name That Antihero!
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 8 out of 10. Klute was the first of the Pakula paranoid trilogy – The Parallax View came three years later, and All The Presidents Men five. So why have I done it in this perverse order? I’ll be asking the questions, young padawan! Really, it should be called Bree (Jane Fonda), because […]
Klute: Character Study Or Detective Thriller?
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 7 out of 10. Well, this show has been all the rave recently, and in my typical fashion, I went into this one hoping that I’d be able to go against the tide and rip Mare of Easttown to pieces. Unfortunately, I won’t be doing that, but it’s not exactly a laudation either… […]
Moreish Mare of Easttown Proves You Can Have Too Much Of A Good Thing
Keller’s daughter goes missing and when he soon realises that the police are taking longer than he thought, he decides to take things into his own hands by going out to find his daughter’s kidnapper himself. However, his mental health begins to decline and so he starts doing things he will soon regret leading him […]
Prisoners – MOVIE REVIEW
Two white South African men are for fighting for equal civil rights. However, whilst trying to spread their message using leaflet bombs they are arrested and charged to 10 years in one of the countries most notorious prisons, Pretoria. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 4.5 out of 5. Daniel Radcliffe stars Tim Jenkin in this one of a […]
Escape From Pretoria – MOVIE REVIEW
Pity the fools who can’t appreciate the magnificent mayhem of “The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard,” the screaming, bustierre-busting glories of Salma Unleashed. Whatever middling “charms” the carnage-packed caper “The Hitman’s Bodyguard” wrung out of pairing up Ryan Reynolds and Samuel L. Jackson in 2017, casting Salma Hayek seriously ups the comic ante in this slaughterhouse of […]
Movie Review: “The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard”
Full disclosure: I was never a part of the original “Space Jam” craze. I was 25-years-old when the movie came out in 1996 and never felt inclined to see it during its initial release. I watched it later (at least most of it) and nothing about it has stuck with me. I say that to […]
First Glance: “Space Jam: A New Legacy”
Dancing is an important element that helps tell the story of love, passion, struggle, pain and even death. It also reveals the identity of the one who performs it and of those who watch.
From director Jamila Wignot, “Ailey” is a beautifully crafted documentary that centers around Alvin Ailey, an African-American dancer, director, choreographer, and activist who founded the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.
Quick Thoughts: In the Heights is an absolute blast. It puts a smile on your face, and is proof that stage musicals can be successfully translated to the big screen. Directed by Jon M. Chu (Crazy Rich Asians, Step Up 2: The Streets, Step Up 3D), In The Heights kicks off the summer season with […]
In the Heights: An Extremely Fun Musical That Will Put a Smile on Your Face
This recently restored film is an interesting look at George Romero and a controversial subject. The Amusement Park (1973) was a discarded film, originally created by Romero as a commission work for the Lutheran Service Society in Pittsburg, but not widely used and thought lost. The original 16mm reels were sitting in Romero’s basement aka […]
One Day YOU will be old – The Amusement Park review #georgeromero
It’s worth remembering that the script for Groundhog Day was, like, way darker than the final movie; the idea of a day endlessly repeating, and how that might feel for those trapped within it, has got legs. Remakes and sequels haven’t followed, and that’s a good thing, but the potential mileage is obvious, and it […]
Palm Springs
Where were you in 2006? Back in the days of flip-phones and Netscape, you probably couldn’t have it much worse than Michael (Ozark’s Charlie Tahan). He’s working as a campus bus driver, ferrying boozed and drugged up students around a freezing Rochester New York, with the attendant vomit-stains and fractured feelings about life that predictably […]
Drunk Bus
A Quiet Place was perhaps the pinnacle of the sensory deprivation horror of the late 2010s – the last of a plethora of films that tried to reinvest the multiplex with a new sensory immediacy by focusing on characters who had one or many senses disabled. That movement didn’t necessarily feel exhausted by A Quiet […]
Krasinski: A Quiet Place Part II (2021)
Needless to say my expectations for the new Christian Petzold film were through the roof. The German filmmaker’s last two movies, 2014’s “Phoenix” and 2018’s “Transit”, are both snugly among my favorites from the last decade. His latest “Undine” has finally come to the States courtesy of IFC Films. And while it might not pack […]
REVIEW: “Undine” (2021)
Title – Dreamland (2019) Director – Miles Joris-Peyrafitte (As You Are) Cast – Margot Robbie, Finn Cole, Garrett Hedlund, Travis Fimmel Plot – During the heat of the Great Depression, lonely Texan teenager Eugene Evans (Cole) strikes up a friendship with on the run bank robber Allison Wells (Robbie) as the two hatch a plan […]
Film Review – Dreamland (2019)
For some reason, I’m getting requests to review super-hero movies, even though it’s hardly an area of expertise. There are good ones, The Dark Night, Thor: Ragnorok, Iron Man 3. But most of them have a written-by-committee feel; David Mamet described a summer blockbuster movie as being like a themed ‘pageant’, and there’s generally little […]
Spider-man: Far From Home
I’m sure it’s your favourite time of the week, because we’ve got another quiz on the lawn! This week the subject is a little contentious – the subject of taking a bath. Personally, and this is my own personal view, I prefer the act of taking a shower. Kramer appears to agree, and has a […]
Quiz: Bathing In Your Own Filth
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 8.5 out of 10. I know I’ve been on a bit of a ’70s run recently, with the likes of The Long Goodbye, The French Connection, The Parallax View and Marathon Man, so I thought this would be a nice change of gear with recent Netflix series Mindhunter. But, ah ha! I’ve fooled […]
How Mindhunter Makes Conversation More Frightening Than Blood
Ok, who hasn’t dreamed dark thoughts about some social media troll who’s made disgusting, cruel or hateful comments about something you’ve said, shared or posted? No one, right? There’s something very satisfying about the thought that some thinks-he-or-she-is-anonymous online troll realizing, with shock, that they aren’t protected from their ugly, sometimes violent opinions by “anonymity” […]
Movie Review: “The Columnist” has a REAL problem with hate mail
(Anne Marie Foy/Netflix) Where will Sandy’s life end up in the third season of The Kominsky Method TV show on Netflix? As we all know, the Nielsen ratings typically play a big role in determining whether a TV show like The Kominsky Method is cancelled or renewed for season four (in this case, we know season […]
The Kominsky Method: Season Three Viewer Votes