Category: Films

Just a brief entry to mention that some weeks ago, I did actually see this film. And guess what, it’s not as bad as some will have you believe. It’s not Gladiator, and Orlando Bloom isn’t Russell Crowe, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Yes, I’m a big Ridley Scott fan, but don’t think…

I caught this amazing telling of the Frank Miller graphic novels (i.e. “comics”) when I was away. Sin City – the name comes from “Basin City” according to a sign – is a dark and ugly place. It’s not Las Vegas despite what you might have thought. The story interweaves several different noirish tales from…

So finally the second trilogy ends in a full circle and we meet ourselves back as we once were in 1978 (or 1977 if you lived in America). The first thing to say about Episode III, as we must call it, is that it’s much better than both Episodes I and II. Overall, Lucas has…

They thought it’d never be made. Lots of times it didn’t. But now it has. Finally the Hitchhiker’s film has arrived. Obviously this was a preview screening, and I was surprised by the scale of it, with it getting an Empire Leicester Square screening, with a queue winding through Leicester Square on arrival. This was…

I finally caught this at the weekend and it’s a stunning film with an amazing performance in the title role from Imelda Staunton. The minutiae of life is really well represented – with the family gathering at home around the dining table in a manner so different from how it is today. So polite. I…

Back in the days when I read comics regularly, I was a big fan of the Alan Moore Swamp Things and it introduced the character of John Constantine. He then got his own comic, Hellblazer which I began to read at the start. On a primary level, Constantine is blond and British. So when Keeanu…

Robots is the latest film from Fox’s CGI animation division Blue Sky. A few years ago I saw Titan AE, their first feature, and now comes Robots, picking up where Pixar have left off. The robot world is colourfully envisioned and there are jokes a plenty, a good deal of them going straight over the…

I’m a massive Wong Kar Wai fan, so it was inevitable that I’d be dashing out to see 2046 (well maybe not quite dashing, since it opened a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve only just seen it). The genesis of this film has been well reported with its gestation taking a good five years…

Day two of my freebie cinema week, and I went to see Clint Eastwood’s new film, Million Dollar Baby. Now I like Clint Eastwood and he’s matured well, making some really interesting films, and in this instance, starring in it too (he even composed the music here). Eastwood’s a boxing trainer at a gym where…

Never one to turn down a bargain, I collected several Evening Standards last week for the free cinema vouchers – one per day for Vue cinemas seven days hence. Now some time ago, a similar offer was run with Odeon, and that time it took some effort to get to see any film at all.…

Creep is a good “old-fashioned” horror film. It’s a British/German co-production and has a relatively low budget, although it sports a strong cast lead by Franka Potente (of Run Lola Run and the Bourne films) as a woman who heads off into the night to party but falls asleep in the tube at Charing Cross…

A couple of years ago I fell in love with Audrey Tatou. It wouldn’t be untrue to say that in actual fact I fell in love with her character in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s film Amelie. Jeunet had previously made Delicatessen, The City of Lost Children and, er, Alien Resurrection. But Amelie was when he really hit…

I went into Sideways knowing very little aside from the fact that it was about a wine taster. Indeed, for all I knew it might have been a documentary. All of which goes to show that I’m not reading enough about upcoming films – it’s fantastic. Paul Giamatti (who’ll you’ll recognise from bit parts in…