Tag: films

  • V FOR VENDETTA

    V FOR VENDETTA

    Let’s start with the obvious, whether Alan Moore’s name is attached to this movie or not, V for Vendetta is about the most reverential adaptation of a book that any author could reasonably wish for. There are flaws, serious flaws in fact, which I’ll come to in a moment, but in terms of respect for […]

    Read More

  • TIDELAND/THE WICKER MAN

    TIDELAND/THE WICKER MAN

    Sometimes you watch a film and you can’t help wondering what the director was thinking when they made it. A major movie is a huge collaborative effort and the director is the captain of the ship. Everyone looks to them for a sign that they’re all sailing on the right course, that everything is working […]

    Read More

  • THE PLANET

    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.

    Read More

  • THE LIFE AQUATIC

    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 […]

    Read More

  • THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN

    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 […]

    Read More

  • THE INCREDIBLES

    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 […]

    Read More

  • THE EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE

    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 […]

    Read More

  • THE CURSE OF THE WERE-RABBIT

    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 […]

    Read More

  • SUPERMAN RETURNS

    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.

    Read More

  • STAR WARS: REVENGE OF THE SITH

    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.

    Read More