I swear this is one of the best films of last year. An end to end thrill ride where every single scrap of action serves only to drive the plot forwards.
I’ve got an itch to break out some old favourites and today I figured we might as well strap in for four hours and have another look at this. My wife hasn’t filed for divorce yet.
A three hour epic that never outstays its welcome. Mann gives so much room for all the characters to breathe that it makes Heat one of the best cat-and-mouse noir films ever made.
I wanted to see the single tracking shot into the nightclub again. It’s one of the best 3 minutes ever put to film; crime can give you so much wealth, luxury and fame but you still have to go in through the back door.
This is a “classic” that I’d never gotten around to watching, but after seeing The Post it felt like perfect timing.
Spielberg, Hanks and Streep team up to make a thinly veiled jab at the scary times we live in.
Releasing an animated film to compete with Disney right in the middle of one of their most successful periods was a bold move. Luckily it paid off both financially and artistically for Fox. It’s a wonderful piece of animation that, apart from the weird flashes of CGI, has survived the last 22 years rather well.
This is my second viewing of Girls Trip and I found it funnier than the first time, and the end even duller than the first time.
Stephanie, a widowed mother (Anna Kendrick) befriends Emily, a mysterious, stylish, confident lady (Blake Lively) who begins to take advantage of her generosity. When Emily goes missing Stephanie does some digging and a web of secrets begins to unravel.
Yes yes I’m very late to the game on this one. You can’t watch everything!
Filmmaker Will Allen looks back on 20 years he spent in a cult, led by mysterious retired actor ‘Michel’.
A girl meets a guy in NYC and travels to Singapore to meet his family. Things get interesting when she finds out he comes from a mega-rich background and his family are famous on the island.
A sequel to the 2008 hit. Meryl’s dead and her daughter runs through some ABBA songs, alongside extended-1979-flashback-Meryl (Lily James). We get the back story about how she met and shagged the three guys that may be her daughter’s father.
When dogs are outlawed by corrupt officials on mainland Japan, they are sent to an island used for refuse disposal. A boy crash lands on the island looking to rescue his dog, and is helped by other dogs along the way.
A deep-sea rescue mission awakens ‘The Meg’, a giant shark thought to have been extinct for 2 million years. It gets very bitey and only Jason Statham can save the day. From the director of Cool Runnings (I don’t know why but it seems worth mentioning).
A Scottish detective (James McAvoy) gets assigned to a murder case, but his world starts to fall apart the more cocaine he takes. Spoiler alert, it’s a fuckload of cocaine.
It’s been a while since the events of The Incredibles and the world is a somewhat darker place for superheroes, they have been forced to live underground since new laws banning those with powers were passed. However, a high profile businessman wants to get them back into the public eye.
A biography of the legendary polymath.
Bogey is Dixon Steele, a famous screenwriter down on his luck. He talks a girl into coming home with him, however their relationship remains platonic and she goes home in a cab.
A sequel to the 2016 Harry Potter spinoff, The Crimes of Grindelwald picks up the story about six months after the events of the first film.
A man goes around collecting magical beasts in a magical suitcase. It’s the Harry Potter-Pokemon crossover you never knew you wanted!
Normally I just jot down a few thoughts about a film on this site. I find it helps me remember them better, plus I can go back and see how wrong I was about stuff.
A child-hacker goes back to his old ways when he turns 18, falling in with a rag tag bunch of cyber criminals. When they are framed for a crime they didn’t commit, he must help get them off the hook.
Set in the days around the death of Willie Lincoln, the son of Abraham Lincoln who died aged 11 while his father was in office. The novel mostly takes place in ‘the bardo’ - a place somewhere between life and death. It’s an ambitious work of magical realism combining cited historical facts with fiction.
A candid set of “Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly” - this is the book that thrust Anthony Bourdain into the public eye, and understandably so. His prose is so vivid, he writes in such a lucid way - it’s like he’s sat right next to you.
The 15th law of filmmaking states: When making a biopic about an iconic, genre-bending, legendary act like Queen, you want Hollywood’s most boring director at the helm. It’s important that a band most well known for its originality and unpredictability should be represented in the most formulaic and pedestrian way possible.
Brad Pitt goes back to comedy after his very funny turn in Burn After Reading, this time playing a war-hungry general sent to Afghanistan in 2009 to ‘get it done’. Also, this time he’s not as funny.
For whatever reason I find myself compelled to try to understand why Hollywood keeps trying to shove Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson in our faces. This time they’ve got him trying to save his family from a burning skyscraper.
The memoirs of a fictional doctor, Sinuhe, who lived in ancient Egypt and witnessed the civilisation at its peak along with its decline following the death of Amenhotep III.
A former high-school nerd (Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson) reconnects with the school cool-guy (Kevin Hart), but after 20 years guess what? Dwayne is super buff and Kevin is an accountant! Oh my how the tables have turned. Turns out Dwayne is a CIA agent being framed for a crime he did or didn’t do and he ropes Kevin into the story to leverage his accounting skills.
Much like Rogue One, Solo serves to flesh out the otherwise quite empty Star Wars universe. Unlike Rogue One, which takes a former plot hole and turns it into a compelling story, Solo feels like a bit of a cash grab.
