Film

Nolan with my homies

There are a lot of ingredients that have to come together for a film to be truly great.  Sometimes a film will come along that blows you away with spectacular visual effects or striking costumes and imagery only to be let down by shoddy characterisation, poor pacing or a clunky script.  For every great ‘effects’ movie that comes along, such ...

A Pianist, an African warlord and the guy from That 70s Show walk into a jungle...

Can lead to tears and seperation anxiety

"100% medically accurate"

Its only when looking back and trying to narrow down a shortlist to ten films did I realise that 2009 has been a pretty awesome year at the cinema.  There have been plenty of films that I enjoyed and many more supposedly great ones that I have yet to get around to watching. So I’ll kick things off with an ...

Four years ago, Rian Johnson debuted with the excellent modern day highschool noir film Brick.  Now he returns with The Brothers Bloom, where once again he handles both the writing and directing duties. The Brothers Bloom is about two brothers where, strangely, only one of them is called Bloom.  The other guy is called Stephen.  Unless their names are Bloom ...

Spoiler: He dies at the end. Shamon.

I have a love/hate relationship with director Tony Scott.  His films are generally fun, action-packed 90 minute thrill rides and yet no one pushes the boundary further on the hyperactive and spasmodic MTV-style editing in their films and it drives me to the point of distraction.  It definitely did with Man On Fire. I guess I must be getting used ...

Duncan Jones’ debut film Moon is one of the best surprises of the year.  The aesthetic of the film reminds me a lot of classic Seventies and Eighties sci-fi films where there was a greater sense of physicality and there isn’t the feeling of hollowness you can sometimes get when a production gets overreliant on computer effects.  Sam Rockwell is ...