PODCAST: Black Widow & Loki [Movie RobCast]

Episode 120 of The Movie Robcast sees Marvel returning to the big screen with Black Widow.

Will Scarlett Johansson’s COVID-delayed swansong in her megastar making role be worth the wait? Or is this Tenet all over again?

The Robs also make room for Loki chat, and Rob Wallis looks ahead to all the Marvel arriving on the big screen and small over the next year.…

REVIEW: Early Man

Aardman Animations’ latest sends comedy back to the Stone Age… but not in the way you might hope.

We open, according to a subtitle, on Neo-Pleistocene Earth, tracking away from a furiously erupting volcano. Dinosaurs tussle up on a ridge; a tribe of primeval persons are exuberantly beating the tar out of one another; all of which are expertly made of plasticine.…

REVIEW: Thor: Ragnarok

It’s hardly the end of the world as we know it.

Let me preface this review by saying, first and foremost, that Thor: Ragnarok is a lot of fun.

That’s the thing most critics seem to have taken away from this latest instalment in the Marvel canon: that it’s fun, funny, loads of fun; just, like, the funnest.…

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.…

High-Rise is the cinema of concrete and chaos

 

There’s something about the technology-driven dystopias of JG Ballard that appeal to a certain breed of director.

Steven Spielberg’s mainstream adaptation of Empire of the Sun is ironically something of an oddity of an oeuvre encapsulated by the steely paraphilia of David Cronenberg’s Crash.…

Crimson Peak: the height of Gothic thrills and chills?

With Crimson Peak, beloved horror director Guillermo Del Toro sets about creating another period ghost story.

While his previous work of course includes The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth, both of which are set in and around the Spanish Civil War, this entry on his filmography takes its cues more from classic Gothic melodrama.…

Thor: The Dark World makes for a fun, forgettable outing in the MCU

 

Marvel Studios is the cinematic juggernaut of our time, perhaps all time.

Spanning eight films over five years, it has so far grossed in excess of $5 billion. Bi-annual releases were common in Phase 1 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe – films ranging from 2008’s Iron Man to The Avengers last year – and, as of 2013, seems likely to become standard practice.…