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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
“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 […]
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.
The original Ghost in the Shell (GitS) was a landmark in quality animation and it remains one of the most satisfying post-cyberpunk sf action movies ever made. Mingling philosophy with wild action sequences, GitS was an almost perfect blend of urban grittiness, large weapons, technology fetishism, big ideas and stylish violence.
Equilibrium borrows liberally from great works of science fiction from the past. 1984, Fahrenheit 451 and Brave New World should all get together and kick the living daylights out of this small-minded piece of rubbish, says Martin McGrath.
One of the many surprising things about Alfonso Cuarón’s adaptation of PD James’s novel The Children on Men is the transformation of a dry and highly conservative novel into an exciting and, at least on the surface, quite radical movie.
Princesses, god-like alien boy scouts and billionaires. When I was a child DC superheroes never appealed, and I think the reason lay with their remoteness from the real world. Sure they would occasionally sweep down from their secret bases onto the mean streets of Gotham or Metropolis (even the cities were made up) to beat […]
In 28 Days Later, Danny Boyle delivers a post-apocalyptic vision of London peopled by wild-eyed lunatics infected with pure rage. They chase ordinary folk through the streets howling inpain and anger and are prone to projectile vomiting. It doesn’t sound too different from the West End on a normal Friday night, says Martin McGrath.