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.
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SOLARIS
Sometimes an opening shot will tell you everything you need to know about a film. Star Wars had huge spaceships, flashing lasers and chest rattling music. From the very beginning, that was going to be a big, brash, exciting movie. Solaris, by contrast, opens with a shot of rain against a window. If that sets […]
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SIN CITY
Whichever way you looked at it – and mostly I do my looking upwards, from the gutter – the streets of Sin City are mean. Really mean. They’re the kind of mean that makes junkyard dogs nervous. They’re the kind of mean that involves dramatic slashes of light through slatted blinds and a reflection catching […]
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SERENITY
At the end of Serenity, ship’s captain Mal (Fillion) has a little speech about the first rule of flying a spaceship – “it ain’t all buttons and charts” he says, but “love that keeps her in the air when she ought to fall down.” Writer/director Whedon is surely addressing the legions of “browncoats” – the […]
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RETURN OF THE KING
The last time I expressed my disappointment with Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy (Matrix 160) I received a couple of letters that can only be described as hate mail. The unsigned author was keen to point out my mental and genetic deficiencies as well as my ignorance of literature and film. The […]
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KING KONG
“It was beauty that killed the beast” is one of the greatest lines in cinema and one of the greatest lies. Oh, beauty made the beast vulnerable but it was greed, Karl Denham’s greed for money and fame, that got the beast killed. It has always been one of cinema’s great injustices that in King […]
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GRAVE OF THE FIREFLIES
Regularly lauded as the best anime of all time, Grave of the Fireflies (Hotaro no Haka) now has a UK region “special edition” DVD release. US film critic Roger Ebert has said that this film belongs on any list of top war movies and others have compared its emotional impact to Spielberg’s Shindler’s List.