There aren’t many filmmakers working today who could have one of their characters propose the toast “Here’s to the director” and it come off as anything other than an ejaculation of ego – let alone if they themselves just happen to be the actor playing that character.
Ah, ‘Maggie’ – the brand new blockbuster that sees Arnold Schwarzenegger travel back through time to the grim and rainy Britain of the 1970s, in order to terminate Mrs. Thatcher, the Baroness of Blood, before she’s able to embark on her baleful reign of baby-eating subjugation.
They killed his dog. And now he’s going to kill them.
The ‘Fast & the Furious’ is the movie series that defies all logic. Not just defies it in fact – it slams its butt-cheeks…
An icon of US machismo in his own right, Eastwood is locked into a pronounced slump as director. Like Woody Allen in the early 2000s, he’s cranking out films faster than ever.
Based on true-life material and telling a remarkable story of physical and psychological strength during wartime, ‘Unbroken’ had previously been talked about as one of the potential heavyweights of the 2014-15 awards season… that was, before anyone had actually seen the thing.
More than a decade in the making, ‘The Grandmaster’ has been heralded by its supporters for even longer than ‘Episode VII’ has by its acolytes.
Tom Jones wanted to blow us all up with his Sex Bomb. Soft Cell wanted us to get all hot under the shin pads…
Department Q is the basement backwater where detective Carl Mørck (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) finds himself reassigned on his return to the force, following his recovery from serious injuries sustained in a stakeout gone wrong. It’s a crypt of cases that are not so much cold as positively Siberian.
The poster for ‘Deliver Us from Evil’ proudly trumpets the film it’s advertising as being ‘Inspired by the actual accounts of NYPD sergeant Ralph Sarchie’ – a significant retreat even from the standard horror movie poster nonsense of ‘Inspired by true events’.
There’s an inherent flaw with fictional depictions of supreme intelligence; namely that the made-up mastermind is only ever able to utter anything as smart as their, in all likelihood, less-than hyper-intelligent creator can come up with.
And if that be the yardstick by which we measure such things then God’s Pocket, the feature directorial debut of silver-haired Mad Men actor John Slattery, smells something very much like the 36 inches which make up the yard.
Ah, Gondry! Michel, ma belle. Like a reanimated ghoul risen from the cold, dead earth, here he is – looking as singularly scruffy and angularly awkward as ever.
Picking up five years on from where the first film left off, How to Train Your Dragon 2 reunites us with Hiccup (voiced once again by the quavering tones of Jay Baruchel), who in the time since we’ve been away has transformed from nerdy teen to cloud-surfing brainbox; a proto-steampunk inventor who’s built himself a wingsuit and a prosthetic leg with changeable appendages (it’s kind of like a Swiss Army Knife mated with Rose McGowan’s gun-leg from Planet Terror).