Category: Reviews

PODCAST: Terminator: Dark Fate [Electric Shadows]

Episode 72 of The Electric Shadows Podcast is another one on location. This time our intrepid explorers in pod, Robs Daniel and Wallis, are at the London O2 braving the latest Terminator film.

In the last ten years paying to see Terminator films has been something of a fool’s errand and the trailers for Dark Fate were not promising.

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REVIEW: A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood [LFF 2019]

With Operation Yewtree looming large over once-idyllic childhood viewing, in the minds of the British public the last few years have altered what it means to be a beloved children’s entertainer.

As such, it’s understandable that UK audiences might not be entirely comfortable with the notion of Mr.…

REVIEW: The Lighthouse [LFF 2019]

As in his 2015 directorial debut The Witch, Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse grapples with the theme of spiritual annihilation, though in a way that’s altogether wetter, wilder, and weirder.

Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe star as two wickies, or lighthouse keepers, cut off on a crag of brine-blasted, inhospitable rock far from the mainland.If…

REVIEW: Joker

After all that critical adulation, it’s a punchline worthy of the Clown Prince of Crime himself that Joker isn’t very good.

We’re in early ’80s Gotham for DC’s latest movie. Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), battling mental illness, is employable only as a street clown sign-spinner for local recession-hit businesses.…

REVIEW: The Personal History Of David Copperfield [LFF 2019]

As suggested by his use of its full title, Armando Iannucci is clearly a man who knows and loves his Dickens.

That might be surprising given the cynical, politically-driven worldview Iannucci is known for versus Dickens’ warm, colourful humanism, but the social issues of the Victorian era are very much in evidence today.…

REVIEW: Colour Out Of Space [LFF 2019]

Colour Out Of Space, Richard Stanley’s first film since being fired from 1996’s The Island Of Doctor Moreau, loses itself in what is, essentially, the colour of the inside of your eyelids.

The pink glow in question comes from a mysterious meteorite, which crashes down on the front lawn of the Gardner family, a bunch of city-dwellers recently escaped to rural Massachusetts.…

REVIEW: Bad Education [LFF 2019]

It may share its name with a Jack Whitehall classroom sitcom and its 2015 big screen spin-off, but Bad Education (sans the “The Movie” subtitle) is all the more troubling in the fact that it’s based on a real-life incident.

When Deputy Superintendent Pam Gluckin (a leonine Allison Janney) is found to have embezzled funds from the Roslyn school district, Superintendent Frank Tassone (Hugh Jackman, clean as a freshly-plucked chicken) makes the case against the calling police.…