MoviesIt would have been easy to throw a bunch of lavish CGI special effects at the screen and simply restage the classic 1959 as a live-action remake, but thankfully, that’s not what Disney have done here. Real love and care have been lavished on this production, teasing out an entirely new perspective on the timeless ..
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MoviesReinterpretations of Dicken’s “A Christmas Carol” are almost as old as the original story itself. Indeed, it’ll crop up in various forms three or four times before The Craggus’ Christmas Countdown comes to an end. By lucky dip, we’re starting with one of the best riffs on the theme, 1988’s “Scrooged”. Bill Murray stars as ..
“Turbo” is the latest animated features to show that it’s not enough to have a cute and clever concept and a great voice cast if you haven’t really got a good story to hang the whole thing on. It starts brightly enough, with Theo the snail (voiced by Ryan Reynolds) dreaming of being the fastest ..
MoviesIt’s always fun to take the hallmarks of a genre and subvert them but rarely is it done as successfully and to such great effect as it is in “Tucker & Dale vs. Evil”. When Tucker and Dale’s trip to their newly purchased holiday cabin coincides with a group of college kids camping out in ..
MoviesModern, clever and creepily effective, “Oculus” is a spine-chilling breath of fresh air for the horror genre, revitalising the haunted house trope in an ingenious way. Telling the story of the Russell Family and their acquisition of the The Lasser Glass, a sinister mirror which the daughter and son come to believe is haunted after ..
Movies“American Hustle”, “Captain Phillips”, “The Wolf Of Wall Street”, “Dallas Buyers Club”; I’ve watched many fine movies recently. Important, critically acclaimed, superbly acted and stylishly directed movies. I’ve been dining on the cinematic equivalent of chateaubriand in Béarnaise sauce. The trouble is, no matter how succulent that steak may be, sometimes you just really, really ..
MoviesWhen I first saw a trailer for “Captain Phillips”, I wasn’t bowled over. I only had a passing familiarity with the real events the film was based on, and the lacklustre title combined with an underwhelming trailer gave me the impression of a Discovery Channel special with talking heads and stagey reconstructions, stretching out thirty ..
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MoviesSanta Claus is a being of immense and extraordinary power. He can visit every house on Earth in the space of one night, so has the ability to manipulate space and time. He is able to gain entry to any structure and knows whether you’ve been bad or good. He is near omnipresent and omniscient ..
MoviesI went into “Pompeii” expecting a disaster movie and ended up getting a pretty disastrous movie, but then what else would you expect from notoriously mediocre director Paul W S Anderson? I do mention the volcano erupts, so *spoilers* ahead, I guess? The film opens with a largely unnecessary and bloodthirsty sequence set in 62AD ..
MoviesSet in the near-future, from the first moments of “Her” it’s clear that two significant changes have occurred in society. The first is that the much anticipated Singularity has occurred and the second is that Simon Cowell has won the argument over the height of trouser waistbands. Joaquin Phoenix plays Theodore Twombly, a writer going ..
Where “Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes” was a pleasant much-better-than-expected surprise, it’s sequel (the sequel to the prequel after the [failed*] reboot of the franchise) has a much higher standard to live up to. Set ten years after the events of the previous film, “Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes” picks up ..
Doctor WhoRefreshingly standalone (although there was still an oblique reference to ‘The Promised Land’ and therefore the enigmatic Missy), “Robot Of Sherwood” is the first universal Doctor Who story of the Capaldi era. By universal, I mean it could have successfully featured any Doctor. The 11th would have loved meeting Robin Hood and all the sceptical ..
MoviesThe award winning book “The Polar Express” by Chris Van Allsburg is a charming tale of a magical train which takes a boy who has begun to have doubts about Santa Claus to the North Pole where he meets the man himself and is rewarded with a special gift, forever preserving the magic of Christmas. ..
MoviesAlways at the more tongue-in-cheek end of the horror scale, the previous four instalments of the “Final Destination” franchise have been gruesomely lightweight shock fests, full of invention and sly dark comedy although they haven’t been immune to the law of diminishing returns. But this fifth instalment…? Meh. This time around, the precognitive vision which ..
MoviesWho knew the Decepticons secretly served some Tutankhamen-looking spider robot who was hiding up in space? That’s the whacky premise at the heart of Michael Bay’s ‘throw everything at the screen and see what sticks’ rock ’em-sock’em robot sequel “Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen”. Lifting some bits and pieces from previous “Transformers” stories (although not ..
Doctor Who*SPOILERS* Okay – this, I think, is the one where I’m going to say Season 8 of “Doctor Who” has clicked, and all the pieces have snapped together in a pleasingly familiar and yet genuinely fresh and different configuration. For the first time, for a whole episode, Capaldi’s Doctor felt like the Doctor. Yes, he’s ..
This comedy horror about one man fighting his inner demons takes the metaphor quite literally while elevating toilet humour to a different level. Ken Marino plays Duncan, a stressed out accountant at an investment firm run by sleazy bully Phil (Patrick Warburton, for once playing against his usual simple buffoon type) who lives with his ..
MoviesI’ve a real soft spot for spoof and parody movies. I enjoy the idea of taking movies, which I love and am passionate about, and holding them up to a fun house mirror to magnify and tweak their foibles. I’m always willing to give them a shot whether they’re works of genius (“Airplane!”, “The Naked ..
MoviesDirector Gore Verbinski and star Johnny Depp have conspired to deliver a wildly inventive take on the Western which simultaneously honours the traditional hallmarks of the genre while cleverly and irreverently tweaking its foibles as well. Brimming with witty dialogue, colourful characters and a richly realised world, the result is an impressive and entertaining triumph. ..
MoviesThe word ‘unfilmable’ is a bit of a cliché when it comes to describing novels being adapted into movies. David Mitchell’s ‘Cloud Atlas’ was thought to be unfilmable, although I thought the Wachowskis did a pretty good job; “Ender’s Game” was also described by its author Orson Scott Card as unfilmable (although I wouldn’t recommend ..
MoviesYou only need to look at the poster to know that the makers of “Walking On Sunshine” (released in cinemas Friday 27th June) saw “Mamma Mia!” and thought ‘that looks really easy – I bet we could do that’. But where “Mamma Mia!” is a carefully crafted jukebox musical based on Abba’s phenomenal back catalogue ..
MoviesI know it’s not fashionable to praise or approve of remakes, but sometimes – every once in a while – they’re actually pretty good. Now I’m not saying that this is better than the original 1947 version but I put it to you that it’s every bit as good. John Hughes (“National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation”, ..
MoviesHammer Horror’s resurrected body (of work) stumbles a little with this elegantly creepy, Seventies-set chiller about an Oxford professor seeking to debunk the supernatural by curing a ‘possessed’ teenage girl. Holing up in an old house in the countryside, Professor Coupland (Jared Harris) and his three students continue their experiments on a psychologically disturbed young ..
Movies“We’re The Millers” is an old fashioned road movie with a liberal sprinkling of modern comedy sensibilities. For a film so prominently featuring drugs, sex and money it’s actually quite sweet and innocent. Yes, there are risqué moments and a few coarse jokes, but it’s pretty vanilla when it comes to really pushing boundaries although ..
MoviesSpin-offs, eh? It seems like a sure thing: take a popular supporting character and give them own fully-fledged adventure but there can be hidden pitfalls. As the swaggering, cocky never-say-die plot drivers (and frequent deus ex machinas) of the “Madagascar” franchise, the team of Penguins led by were charming and hilarious but really, how hard ..
MoviesSo we find ourselves back in ‘adaptation of a beloved young adult novel’ territory with the long-in-development movie of Lois Lowry’s 1993 novel. I like to think, in the mad scramble to snap up every halfway popular young adult novel after “Twilight” hit it big, that there was some executive who greenlit this in the ..
MoviesEmboldened and empowered by the success of the first two films, there’s nobody involved in this production now who’s willing or able to restrain Michael Bay so “Transformers: Dark Of The Moon” is an exercise in lavish, indulgent excess. Aside from the grammatically irritating title, this is properly the film where the franchise jumped the ..