Category: Films

This evening Newsnight had a lovely little report about Ray Harryhausen, the film genius behind such films as One Million Years BC, Jason and the Argonauts, and Clash of the Titans (no – not the recent one). They are the films of my childhood – regularly repeated every Bank Holiday. You’d always happily watch them.…

I saw this while I was away recently, and somehow neglected to note it here (mind you – I’ve been going to the cinema so infrequently recently, this isn’t entirely surprising). I suspect that the real reason that I’d not got around to mentioning Robin Hood thus far is that I’d completely forgotten that I’d…

Green Zone is the latest film from Paul Greengrass and his team. And by team, I don’t just mean Matt Damon. He’s clearly assembled together a very tight group of people who work with him. There’s cinematographer Barry Ackroyd who worked on United 93, composer John Powell who worked on that and all the Bourne…

One of my favourite series of novels of recent years has been Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy. I’ve read all three of the novels in hardback no less, having read interesting things about The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo ahead of its English language publication in January 2008. By October last year, the final volume of…

What links these two films? Absolutely nothing, although both were showing in the Curzon Mayfair last week, I only saw A Prophet there. For better of for worse, I saw Up In The Air in my local Cineworld. They offer very different cinema going experiences, yet not at a colossal price differential. I’ll get onto…

Look – it’s my own fault. I should have gone to see An Education instead. But somehow, even though I knew in advance it’d be garbage, actors like John Cusack and Thandie Newton drew me in. And I went and saw 2012. I’ll try to atone next week when the new Coen brothers film comes…

I’ve been quite a fan of Jon Ronson for ages, and read The Men Who Stare At Goats when it came out. In it Ronson went out and met some very strange people who’d been funded by the US military to develop psychic abilities for the aid or prevention of warfare. For this film version…

I got invited to a bloggers’ screening of Bunny and the Bull, and went in knowing little to nothing about the film. The film’s writer and director, Paul King, has directed nearly every episode of The Mighty Boosh, but although I like that programme, I’ve only seen it intermittantly, whereas some live and breathe all…

Paranormal Activity is a great little film that seems to have sprung up out of nowhere. It was actually made a couple of years ago before it was snapped up from a festival and has had a little gloss added to it. But not much. Like The Blair Witch Project, everything we see is from…

The Informant! (I guess the exclamation mark is important) is the latest film from director Stephen Soderburgh, and if I said that it was about one man taking on liars and corporate greed, you might wonder if Soderburgh was revisiting the territory he first examined with Erin Brokovich. But this is a very different film…

Dear Lemon Lima is one of those many films that you have see completely blind at a film festival. According to IMDB it’s only had a screening at one other film festival and I can’t see details of a release date which is a terrible shame. Vanessa Lemor (Savanah Wiltfong) is a young teenage girl…

The London Film Festival opened on Wednesday, and this week I caught a few films: Fantastic Mr Fox, which was the opening film of the festival (I wasn’t at the premiere sadly), a UCLA restored version of Topper, and a Columbia restoration of Dirigible. Fantastic Mr Fox is a terrific stop-animation version of the Roald…