Movies

LIFE OF PI     Movies based on books are always fraught. They come loaded with so many expectations about whether they will match the tone and feel of the book – which is unfair since books and movies are two wholly different storytelling mediums and hence a movie must Continue Reading

  I love Daniel Craig as James Bond because he is as suave and sophisticated as we’ve come to expect this most dapper of spies to always be, but he is always also ruggedly, mischievous with a self-deprecating wit that works a treat in these rather more self aware post Continue Reading

  The universal question that On the Road poses almost from the first frame is this – at what point does a damaged person’s need for self preservation become a narcissism so malignant it becomes poisonous to everyone around them? It is a question worth asking especially in a world Continue Reading

LOOPER     Looper, written and directed by Ryan Johnson and starring acting wunderkind Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis as younger and older versions respectively of Joseph Simmons, a time-travelling mafia contract killer from 2044 who finds out that next his target is … himself,  looks like the sort of Continue Reading

  It will come as no surprise to many that we no longer want our fairytales served up with a   large side order of twee. Gone are the days, for the most part, of movie makers bringing out fairytales movies, whether live action or cartoon, that don’t feature some Continue Reading

  The need to belong is common to all people regardless of race, creed, colour or any of the other thousand and one permutations of humanity. And Wes Anderson, the delightfully idiosyncratic auteur who brought us Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums, a keen observer of the human condition and student Continue Reading

  It is rare to find a movie that gloriously and unapologetically seeks to engender a feel good vibe so infectious you are tempted to dance, or at the very least sashay, like a member of a 60s female soul group, out of the theatre at the end of it, Continue Reading

  The first thing anyone needs walking into a fast-moving action-saturated movie like this is a suspension of belief so large and weighty you need a cherry picker to hoist it into the cinema seat next to you. Once that’s done, Total Recall, directed by Underworld’s Len Wiseman, and based Continue Reading

  *SOME SPOILERS BELOW* In this modern cynical age, it is a given that the world is rotten to the core, the structures of power and authority that govern it are hollowed out and corrupt, and those that work within it morally compromised beyond all redemption. It is a world Continue Reading

  I am not usually a subscriber to the adage that “they don’t make ’em like they used to” since I firmly believe that, while old movies/film/books are valuable parts of the pop culture canon, they are not the sum total of human creative expression, and are certainly not the Continue Reading