Author James Andrews

'Kurt Russell as Santa' is as simple yet intriguing an elevator pitch as any, and in Netflix's latest festive original movie The Christmas Chronicles - it works. Unfortunately, not a lot else does in this...

After a dragon tattoo (twice), a fire and a hornet's nest, this time it's The Girl in the Spider's Web. And now the girl is The Crown's Claire Foy – breaking well and truly away from the part she's best...

A British comedy horror with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost in? (And the debut for their production firm Stolen Picture?) The Shaun of the Dead comparisons are inevitable, but Slaughterhouse Rulez is a different...

Screenwriter extraordinaire Drew Goddard (Cloverfield, World War Z, The Martian) is back with his second feature as a director, Bad Times at the El Royale. His latest finds a group of strangers unravelling a...

How much you laughed at the first two Johnny English films will be a good barometer for your enjoyment level of this belated third mission. Strikes Again does little to break from the series' established...

As Rowan Atkinson returns this week for a third Johnny English film that no-one really asked for, it seems inevitable that this unlikely franchise (based around a character created for a '90s Barclaycard ad...

Director Lenny Abrahamson follows his Oscar-nominated Room by opening things up to a mansion with this period Gothic mystery. Said mansion is the dilapidated Hundreds Hall in post-War rural Warwickshire, and...

"You've come a very long way in a very short time." So says another character to Oscar Isaac's Abel Morales in A Most Violent Year. The same could well be said about the actor himself. As recently as 2012 you...

If you've only got to know Ann Dowd through her recent roles in Hereditary and TV's The Handmaid's Tale (like a certain writer, ahem), you'd be forgiven for wanting to steer well clear of her if you ever met...

The conceit of The Happytime Murders might have made a half decent Saturday Night Live sketch but a good, even passable, feature film it does not. Most frustrating is the sheer laziness of the script. Todd...

The plot of 2016 movie The Shallows is pretty easy and quick to sum up: it's Blake Lively versus a shark. This excellent, taut thriller sees her surfer, Nancy, get attacked and injured by a great white - then...

Samuel L. Jackson? A scene stealer in Deep Blue Sea? But wasn't he the star of that movie? Well, yes and no. Just go with this. 1999's cult favourite, about a group of genetically engineered sharks going on...

2008's Will Ferrell-John C. Reilly team-up Step Brothers is almost irredeemably stupid and low-brow when viewed again with a decade's more maturity, and through the more enlightened filter of 2018. Almost...

In the wake of the sensational Hereditary, another psychological horror about a tormented, seemingly cursed family was always going to struggle in comparison. And while it ultimately goes in a wholly different...

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom came roaring into cinemas last week, with our Phil calling the sequel/fifth outing 'an entertaining ride... with a fun B-movie premise, decently executed'. Generally good...