Beauty And The Beast (2017)
Obligatory “tale as old as time” reference.
Disney’s original Beauty And The Beast holds a special place in my heart: it was, according to my parents, the first film I ever saw in the cinema; aged just eighteen months.
Kong: Skull Island: monkey see, monkey well done
SPOILERS
A U.S. flyboy plummets out of the sun; hooked to a parachute.
His fighter plane death-spiraling into a flaming wreck on the white sand of Pacific beach. His panicked grappling with a Japanese pilot, his nemesis; a battle to the death on a clifftop drenched in searing light.…
CINEMATIC GRAB-BAG: The Great Wall & Trespass Against Us
The Great Wall
To misquote the film’s tagline, “Three years, $150 million to make, what were they hoping to prove?”.
Zhang Yimou’s The Great Wall is at best a misguided curiosity – people kept trooping in and out of my screening like it was a visitor’s ward.…
Logan (Electric Shadows podcast)
In Episode 19 of The Electric Shadows Podcast, Rob Daniel & myself get all X-cited about Logan, Hugh Jackman’s swansong to the X-Men franchise. And – spoiler alert – this Wolverine can really cut it in a film that boasts amazing action, genuine emotion, and a chilling vision of where Donald Trump’s America is heading.…
Logan: an elegiac, sincere, and bloody end to an era
SPOILER-FREE
“You should take a moment, feel it.”
We’ve come a long way since a fresh-faced, devil-haired Wolverine first popped his claws in an Alberta biker’s bar back in the original X-Men.
Now, seventeen years and nine films later, Hugh Jackman is heading down south of the border for Logan; a farewell letter to the role that took him from a London production of Oklahoma!…
20th Century Women: sun-dappled reflections on ’70s history; both personal and cultural
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The surrogate bunch in Mike Mills’ latest, 20th Century Women, is certainly unique; if not quite unhappy.
It’s tough being a kid: discovering your sense of self, your place in the world.…
Oscars 2017 (Electric Shadows podcast)
Rob Daniel & myself do an early morning post-Oscars review after staying all night to watch the ceremony. The highs, the lows, the biggest gaffe in Oscar history, we chat all about it here. Jimmy Kimmel did a great job, the (possibly staged) Celebrity Zoo was a bizarre misfire, and damn… that ending.
…CINEMATIC GRAB-BAG: A Cure For Wellness & Patriots Day
A Cure For Wellness
A Cure For Wellness is a film I wish was better.
A psychological horror with grandiose ambitions, it stars Dane DeHaan as Lockhart, a callow young stockbroker with ice-chip eyes dispatched to retrieve his company’s CEO from a remote “wellness center” in the Swiss Alps.…
Wellness, Wick, & The Founder (Electric Shadows podcast)
In Episode 18 of The Electric Shadows Podcast, Rob Daniel & myself pay tribute to the Hollywood legend, the sorely missed Bill Paxton.
We also turn a critical eye toward Gore Verbinski’s A Cure for Wellness, lock n’ load with John Wick: Chapter 2 and get stuck into tasty McDonald’s biopic The Founder; boasting a fantastic lead performance from Michael Keaton.…
Hidden Figures: three women, one important historical course correction
Progress comes in many forms, both self-evident and obscure.
For every grand act of public heroism or defiance that makes it into the history books, seeking to set up a new beachhead of progression, there are million moments of quiet, often unacknowledged toil; individually chipping away at the bedrock of prejudice.…