THE PLANET
It is tempting, with a film like The Planet, to be condescending. Like watching a dog deliver Hamlet’s soliloquy, it is easy to be impressed that the performance is taking place at all and ignore the quality of the delivery.
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THE LIFE AQUATIC
A lot of people are really going to hate The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Some sad, possibly miserable, people are going to walk from the cinema bemused, cursing the director and his cast for wasting two hours of their lives on a rambling, strange and apparently pointless quest for a yellow shark. We should […]
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THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN
Comics, at least in the hands of a talented creative teams, are a much denser medium than film. Comics can encompass more visual information and more complex literary ideas, page for page, than a film script. This is certainly true of Stephen Norrington’s attempt to convert Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s The League of Extraordinary […]
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THE INCREDIBLES
For my money the previous holder of the title “best superhero movie ever made” is M Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable, a film that is intimately familiar with the genre’s tropes – the relationships between heroes and villains, between heroes and their teen sidekicks, the balance of power necessary to keep the heroes vulnerable and the way […]
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THE EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE
As a horror film, The Exorcism of Emily Rose hardly breaks new ground owing, as it does, a huge debt to William Friedkin’s superior The Exorcist for pretty much every chill or thrill that it offers. What makes it interesting, though hardly enjoyable, is the way in which it reflects the conflict between faith and […]
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THE CURSE OF THE WERE-RABBIT
There will be those who claim that the best thing about Nick Park and Steve Box’s magnificent Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit is the distinctively British humour – this is a film full of brilliant groan-inducing puns, Heath-Robinson contraptions, buck-toothed vicars and the occassional sea-side postcard moment of double entendre. Whether American […]
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SUPERMAN RETURNS
The infuriating thing about Superman is that the mythology of his origin – two Jewish boys (Siegel and Shuster) reacting to Naziism by creating a golem – is far more interesting than the hero they created.
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STAR WARS: REVENGE OF THE SITH
The greatest irony in Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith is that the original generation of Star Wars fans have, through their constant complaints about the prequel trilogy, forced George Lucas to make a film that many of them would have been unable to watch when they first fell in love with his universe.
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STAR WARS (DVD RELEASE)
I have never understood the violent passion aroused by Star Wars. I know some people hate it, regarding it as somehow debasing science fiction (and, indeed, the whole of cinema) though for me they remain an entertaining and imaginative sequence of films – not profound, certainly, but fun. More bewildering, though, are those who adore […]
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SPIRITED AWAY
If your previous encounters with Japanese animation stretch only as far as Akira and the occasional juvenile movie featuring giant robots, then Spirited Away may be as pleasant a surprise to you was it was to me.