REVIEW: F9

The Fast & Furious franchise returns in its ongoing quest for peak automotive ridiculousness.

In the twenty years since we first heard Dom Toretto (Vin Diesel) evoke “fam-lee” in his rumbling baritone, it may have occurred to you that we know nothing about his own.…

REVIEW: The Good Liar

Bill Condon’s latest movie is based on an all-too obvious deceit. After all, when you name a film The Good Liar, you beg the question, “Who?”.

An elderly pair –Roy (Ian McKellen) and Betty (Helen Mirren) – are getting together for a first date.…

REVIEW: Winchester

Gun-house, not fun-house.

The House of Haunted Hill. The Shining. Poltergeist. The Amityville Horror. The Conjuring. The haunted house is perhaps the staple trope of the whole horror genre. The things that go bump in the night are, as a rule, scarier when they’re living – or not living – in your home, and in Winchester, the Spierig Brothers have given themselves some prime real estate to play with.…

Collateral Beauty gets it as right as it can in service of a bad idea

Collateral Beauty is a awards-baiting drama about three big-city advertising execs who come together to gas-light their grieving friend for the sake of a big payday.

Okay, so it’s not quite as a simple as that, morality-wise; a fact that the film is desperate to impress upon us.…

In Eye in the Sky we say goodbye to Alan Rickman

 

Eye in the Sky is the type of film that lends itself to descriptors like “timely” and “prescient”.

It may not be the first drama to tackle the spectre of drone warfare – Ethan Hawke-starrer A Good Kill did so through the lens of a character study – but it is certainly has the weightiest cast.…

Eye in the Sky is a timely look at drone warfare (RIP, Alan Rickman)

 

Eye in the Sky is the type of film that lends itself to descriptors like “timely” and “prescient”.

It may not be the first drama to tackle the specter of drone warfare – Ethan Hawke-starrer A Good Kill did so through the lens of a character study – but it is certainly has the weightiest cast.…

Trumbo is a barnstorming triumph of cinematic liberalism

 

From Sunset Boulevard to Argo, Hollywood has always been in the business of self-mythologizing.

It’s not often, though, that the industry takes its licks for the mistakes it’s made along the way.

Writ large among them is, of course, the blacklist, which saw scores of talented, Left-leaning film-makers left out in the cold as the paranoia surrounding Communism reached fever pitch.…

RED 2 is a perfectly good geri-actioner

 

Do you remember my review of A Good Day to Die Hard, all the way back in the mists of time?

There’s no reason for you to, but in it I aired my complaints with what has become of the series that gave Bruce Willis a career beyond Moonlighting.…

Hitchcock has too much makeup and not enough blood

 

“My name is Alfred Hitchcock…”

Thus begins both Alfred Hitchcock Presents, the anthology TV series hosted by The Master of Suspense, which ran from 1955 to 1965, and Hitchcock, the biopic of his life, directed by Sacha Gervasi (Anvil!