Generally, when someone says a Hollywood blockbuster is “the worst film ever” my reaction is to ball my fingers into a fist and beat him soundly. It’s not that I want to defend big studio releases or even that I think The Matrix Revolutions, Pearl Harbour or John Carter are good films. They’re obviously not. […]
John Carter of Mars is going to go down in the history books as one of the biggest flops in cinema history . It might have been cheaper for Disney to actually build a pile of money and climb to Edgar Rice Burrough’s fabled Barsoom rather than make this film. The early reckoning is that […]
No one should go into director David Mackenzie’s Perfect Sense expecting a light-hearted romp. This apocalyptic romance is a slow-burn – despite packing four separate-but-linked disasters into a brief 88 minute. Its characters exist on the edge of the world (well, Glasgow) and can only watch and wait, essentially incapable of influencing the flow of […]
Hugo is a beautifully made film with a big heart. Every frame is overflowing with the director, Martin Scorcese’s, obvious love and enthusiasm for the medium in which he has immersed himself during his career. Every part of the film fits together as neatly and as intricately as the clockwork mechanisms that feature so frequently […]
One of the things that I’ve got back into thanks to the purchase of a tablet is regularly reading comics bought via Comixology. Having got the taste electronically, I’ve also started to pick up a number collected editions and graphic novels. So I thought I might start off putting together a monthly review of the […]
Chronicle is the story of three high school kids: Andrew, a “troubled” loner from a poor family with an abusive father and a sick mother; Matt, his smarter, more popular cousin; and Matt’s friend Steve, the token ethnic character. “Troubled” Andrew has recently taken to carrying around an improbably large video camera, which is lucky […]
Somewhere in the heart of Love is a very good short film being brutally battered to death by a writer/director intent on driving home his “VERY IMPORTANT MESSAGE” without subtlety. That’s not to say that there aren’t good things in Love, but you have to work to dig them out from a film that is […]
This review was published in Vector 268 The Hammer by KJ Parker In most fantasy novels Gignomai met’Oc – the Loki-ish third son of a great aristocratic clan – would be the novel’s shadowy villain. He steals from his family and skives off from his duties, he lies and cheats and he plots the destruction […]
I’m going to spend some of this review taking issue with elements of Adam Roberts’ new novel, By Light Alone, so I think I should start off by staying up front that I thought this was both a thought-provoking and immensely enjoyable book. Indeed one of the reasons I’m going to spend so much time […]
I appear to have misplaced my copy of Dead Water by Simon Ings, which is annoying and makes reviewing the book tricky because my notes are scribbled all over it. If anyone finds a copy in a second hand bookshop somewhere with the phrase “I fucking love this” repeatedly scratched in the margin in HB1 […]