PODCAST: Top 10 of the 2019 London Film Festival [Electric Shadows]

Episode 71 of The Electric Shadows Podcast is an epic review of our top 10 of the 2019 London Film Festival.

Over the course of two hours, Robs Daniel & Wallis run through their respective Top 10s of the festival. There is some crossover, but some shocks are in store as films make one Rob’s list but not the other.…

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.…

PODCAST: FrightFest 2019 Round-Up and London Film Festival 2019 Preview [Electric Shadows]

Episode 68 of The Electric Shadows Podcast sees Robs Daniel & Wallis look back at the Arrow Video FrightFest’s twentieth anniversary festival and run-down their top 10 films. Gems such as Rabid, The Dark Red, Ready or Not and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark all get warm words.…

REVIEW: The Front Runner (LFF 2018 – Day 4)

Ivan Reitman’s latest, The Front Runner, is an unexpectedly topical account about what we have the right to expect from our politicians – and perhaps what we don’t.

It’s 1988, and Colorado Senator Gary Hart (Hugh Jackman) seems like the ideal candidate for the Democratic nomination.…

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!

Pan is a wannabe Hook for the Avatar generation

 

For kids of the ‘90s, Steven Spielberg’s Hook is something of a childhood classic.

Starring the late great Robin Williams as the jaded grown-up Peter Pan and no less than Dustin Hoffman as the dastardly, mustache-twirling Hook — not to mention Dame Maggie Smith’s elderly Wendy and Bob Hoskins’ workaday Smee — it’s pure cinematic confection.…

Chappie: more bats**t conceptual sci-fi from Neil Blomkamp

 

Forget about Paul Verhoeven. Step aside, the Wachowskis. There’s a new master in town when it comes to bats**t conceptual sci-fi.

South African director Neil Blomkamp is well known for his allegorical social commentary – apartheid in District 9, health care and the 1% in Elysium – but the underpinnings of Chappie are mainly philosophical.…

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.…

The Wolverine: a Western-Samurai-superhero mashup with claws

 

After four years in the wilderness, the X-Men’s hairiest, surliest associate is back with his own feature film. And good news: it’s not X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

There was a lot to feel hopeful as The Wolverine approached. Even with the original director, Darren Aronofsky, having dropped off the project, there was still the Chris Claremont/Frank Miller source material in place – the cool Japanese milieu, Wolverine as a ronin (samurai without a master) – and, of course, Hugh Jackman, who is to the 20th Century Fox X-verse what Robert Downey Jr.…

Les Miserables: Faith, grace, mercy, and music (and getting a head in Revolutionary France)

 

You know that sometimes you leave the cinema struggling to articulate exactly what it is that you’ve just seen?

Those are my feelings regarding Les Miserables, the adaptation of Cameron Mackintosh’s blockbuster musical, directed by Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech).…