REVIEW: A Haunting in Venice

Given how littered it is by corpses, it’s remarkable the extent to which ghosts are absent from the murder mystery genre.

Aside from the plot ramifications – it’s tricky sustaining the whole “whodunnit” aspect when you have an incorporeal witness – it does tend to undermine the foundation of rationality on which the process of detection is built.…

PODCAST: Tenet & The New Mutants [Movie RobCast]

Episode 98 of The Movie Robcast is a bumper episode, taking a close look at Tenet and ending with a review of the long-delayed X-Men movie, The New Mutants.

Excitingly, joining us for this ep is on demand movie manager Jasen Govinden to give his opinions on Christopher Nolan’s time-twisting head scratcher.…

REVIEW: Murder on the Orient Express (2017)

Kenneth Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express is undoubtedly a grand production, but lacks the elegant simplicity to be a truly first-class entertainment.

Unlike Sydney Lumet’s 1974 adaptation, this is less a starry, lavishly-upholstered murder mystery than a modern-day blockbuster that just seems to be based on an Agatha Christie novel.…

Little Grey Celluloid: Some Thoughts on Poirot in Film (and TV)

So, Brexit…

When Agatha Christie conceived of perhaps her most iconic creation, her choice of nationality for him carried with it a certain European esprit de corps. It was 1916, though the first novel wasn’t published until 1920, and Belgium was then occupied by the forces of imperial Germany.…

REVIEW: Dunkirk; or my thoughts on time & tide in Nolan’s masterpiece of immediacy and magnitude

Christopher Nolan is arguably the foremost British director of his generation, certainly when it comes to visionary blockbusters.

As such, it seems strange that he should follow the – literal – universality of 2014’s Interstellar with a film that seems, on the face of it, so self-contained; parochial even.…

Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit fails to fully surface

 

Has ever a hero been rebooted as repeatedly and with little aplomb as Jack Ryan? From Sean Connery-starrer Hunt for the Red October back in 1990 through to the present day, Tom Clancy’s best-known protagonist has grossed more than half a billion dollars.…