Tagged movie review

What makes a “bad film”? Does the whole shebang have to be rotten? Or is it just aspects - the director, the cast, the story, the idea? It might be these questions, and probably a few more, that will...

Hot Pursuit is an inoffensive journey into Hollywood déjà vu; it’s all so familiar. The overall effect is not exactly bad (barring an apparent silly-costume quota) but is definitely bland. The film...

Satire should be served bubbling; so acidic that it burns the spoon on which it is being delivered from. The Interview, by comparison, is a trampled clot of stinging nettles with some tired genital jokes...

The Hunger Games hasn’t given birth to twins. Instead, it has stretched out the limbs of its concluding chapter to the point of cracking dislocation. The bite of the adaptation’s first instalments has...

Jake Gyllenhaal unfurls creepy wings as Lou Bloom, a determined vulture ready to feather his own nest in the shade of the American Dream. Lou’s maniac eyes share the same greedy glint as his hungry camera....

Interstellar is magnificently ambitious. It is just a shame that narrative appears to be the stubbiest finger upon the grasping palm of its lofty aspirations. Nolan’s space odyssey detonates some of the...

Richard Linklater’s expertise - or at least his largest triumphs - has been in the capturing of rapidly burning candles. By comparison, Boyhood (a project filmed over twelve years) is a great fire; burning...

Michael Bay isn’t a film director. He’s a demolition expert, and a damn good one at that. So much destruction explodes across Age of Extinction, in fact, that it appears to have shellshocked any semblance...

Dragons really are the myth du jour. Daenerys Targaryen’s beastly brood continues to incinerate all of HBO’s competition, while Smaug, Tolkien’s monstrous kleptomaniac, is looking to drag another $1bn of...

22 Jump Street is belly-aching, mickey-taking, cinema-shaking summer comedy at its very best. Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s follow up to their 2012 reboot does not shy away from its bigger sequel status....

Hayao Miyazaki’s films have always been bathwater cinema; warm and comforting and so enchantingly illustrated that we never truly want to leave them. The grief of being hoisted out of The Wind Rises,...

The Case Against 8 is a never-more-than-ordinary documentary about a never-less-than-extraordinary series of events. Needless, theatricality proves to be its main undoing. In one scene, Ted Olson reads back...

Under the Electric Sky is a ridiculous film which exhibits ridiculous people. Shot during 2013’s Electric Daisy Carnival it offers zero accessibility and little of interest to anyone not already associated...

“What goes on inside that head?” Michael Fassbender goes one better than Karl Urban’s Judge Dredd in the bizarrely sublime (or is that sublimely bizarre?) Frank. This is a film which, given a chance...

Shuddering footage extrapolated from a cellphone shows a group of black men sitting on a station floor. One is thrown down and a bang stings the air. Fruitvale Station begins with an ending. Michael B. Jordan...