If at first you don’t succeed, get covered in boiling alien blood and try, try again.
What the forgettably titled Edge of Tomorrow most reminds us, however, is that Tom Cruise is at his best when not playing an outright hero.…
Author: robertmwallis
Graduate of Royal Holloway and the London Film School. Founder of Of All The Film Sites; formerly Of All The Film Blogs. Formerly Film & TV Editor of The Metropolist and Official Sidekick at A Place to Hang Your Cape. Co-host of The Movie RobCast podcast (formerly Electric Shadows) and member of the Online Film Critics Society.
Locke shows that all you need for a great film is an engine
The shadowy interior of a BMW, the sallow yellow glare of a streetlamp; road markings, overpasses. “You have a call waiting”.
As premises go, Locke’s is rivetingly simple: Ivan Locke, a foreman on a construction site, has had to make a last-minute trip from Birmingham down to London.…
X-Men: Days Of Future Past is like a dog chasing its tail – fun but circuitous
It’s been fourteen years since the X-Men franchise first graced our cinema screens.
That’s roughly the length of time it took Star Trek to go from The Motion Picture to Generations, the film when we finally bade farewell to William Shatner’s Captain James T.…
Godzilla (2014) is like a storm on the horizon
How many films is it possible to make about a giant rampaging lizard?
An idea may be all in the execution – after all, how many films can you make about a Walther-packing, martini-swilling super-spy? – but the need to have buildings crumble and people scream surely serves as something of a limiting factor.…
Two Faces of January is a multi-faceted Highsmith thriller
As film directors go, it’s hard to escape the shadow of Alfred Hitchcock.
The iconically portly Brit directed more than 50 films during his lifetime with an impressive batting average in terms of outright classics: Psycho, Vertigo, North by Northwest.…
Let’s be Frank: this indie dramedy has an identity crisis
It’s a bit of a contradiction when you walk into a film with no idea of what to expect and walk out somehow disappointed.
This is certainly true in the case of Frank, a quirky little indie dramedy from director Lenny Abrahamson.…
Blue Ruin’s cautionary tale is Death Wish meets the Hatfield-McCoys
Real life isn’t like the movies.
True love is not the inevitable outcome of a tempestuous first meeting and cars don’t blow up just because you put a few bullets in them. It’s this reality that is at the heart of Blue Ruin.…
Brick Mansions is not quite solid cinema
It’s a sad fact of life that actors die during filming.
Not only is their passing tragic at whatever age, it has the added effect of leaving their final work unfinished. There are, of course, ways around this.
When screen veteran Oliver Reed died before shooting all his scenes for Gladiator, the filmmakers used a body double and CGI to depict the altered fate of his character, Proximo.…
The Machine can’t quite locate a soul amid the moving parts
As productions, Transcendence and The Machine couldn’t be further apart.
The first is a $100 million Hollywood blockbuster starring Johnny Depp; the second was shot on 1% of that budget with a British TV actor best known as the villain from Die Another Day.…
The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is shockingly average
It is a truth universally acknowledged that the middle film in a trilogy tends to be the best.
Movie lovers may be torn between The Godfather and Godfather, Part II, but the rule certainly holds true for The Empire Strikes Back, Terminator 2, The Dark Knight.…