The Flash has plenty of heart but loses its soul to cynical CGI On paper, THE FLASH was not a movie that had a lot going for it. A lead actor mired in controversy and criminal legal difficulties, a lame duck cinematic universe marking time until it’s rebooted, and a broken and fragmented fanbase which, ..
The power of Russell Crowe compels you to watch The Pope’s Exorcist When the Vasquez family arrive to take up residence in an old Spanish Abbey – a bequest from the recently deceased father – its not long before their son, Henry, starts acting strangely. As his condition worsens and his behaviour grows more extreme ..
Evil Dead Rise sets out to Make Horror Grate Again! After the perennially troubled franchise failed to get a direct sequel to either ARMY OF DARKNESS, or THE EVIL DEAD (2013) or even a fourth season of ASH VS THE EVIL DEAD off the ground, the Deadites finally managed to return to cinemas in Lee ..
Knock At The Cabin delivers M Night Shyamalan’s most unexpected twist yet. Knock knock! Who’s there? Dave… Dave who? Dave Bautista in his most beefily earnest role yet as M Night Shyamalan stages a remarkable return to form with KNOCK AT THE CABIN. After the disappointment of OLD, he suddenly feels new again. When four ..
Horror’s answer to Where’s Wally is back in The Nun II Although I’ve had something of a love/ hate relationship with the horror genre over the years, one thing that’s always remained consistent is that horror based on Catholic iconography and catechism is like catnip to me, so it’s little wonder that THE NUN quickly ..
Smoking Causes Coughing, Quentin Dupieux’s absurdist satire of superhero sci-fi, packs an unexpected punch. Systematically silly, SMOKING CAUSES COUGHING introduces us to “Tobacco Force”, France’s premier superhero team; wearers of spandex, defeaters of rubber monsters and moralisers on, ironically, the evils of smoking, there’s nothing they can’t do – except maintain team morale. Ordered by ..
As Insidious: The Red Door closes, let’s hope another one doesn’t open. INSIDIOUS: THE RED DOOR brings Patrick Wilson’s other horror franchise back to its main narrative thread after the previous two films in the series offered unnecessary and underwhelming forays into prequelisation, coming back to the Lambert family nearly a decade on from the ..
The most humane thing would be to put this movie out of our misery It’s a rare movie indeed that can make me fundamentally question my love for cinema, but like Martin Scorcese finding himself at ComiCon, STRAYS made me do that. It even made me like dogs a little less. Crass but rarely clever, ..
The Star Beast or “How Doctor Who got its groove back.” Guess Who’s back? And, more importantly, back where it belongs: prime Saturday tea time telly? That’s right, it’s DOCTOR WHO and everything old is new again as a brand new era begins with more than one blast from the past as THE STAR BEAST ..
Renfield is a horror comedy you can sink your teeth into. After the portentous self-importance of the DARK UNIVERSE announcement and the subsequent Cruise-led catastrophic misfire of THE MUMMY, how was Universal to take advantage of its storied back catalogue of horror icons? I doubt anyone could have guessed that the answer would have been ..
The Boogeyman is bogus, man I had high hopes for THE BOOGEYMAN. After all, when it comes to horror, it’s hard to resist a pedigree which boasts “From The Mind Of Stephen King” even if that doesn’t quite carry the same hallmark of quality cinematically that it carries in publishing, but the trailer was rock ..
Dammit, Janet! Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania fuses silly and sinister family secrets The 31st release of the MCU, ANT-MAN AND THE WASP: QUANTUMANIA picks up the baton of a $29 billion-dollar-and-counting relay after the reprehensibly risible THOR: LOVE AND THUNDER and the maudlin earnestness of BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER and had me leaving the ..
This time it’s the years, not the mileage which weigh heavily on Henry Jones Jr For a film whose main – perhaps even sole – selling point is nostalgia, it’s an odd choice that it chooses not to dissolve from the still-present Paramount Logo into a diegetic mountain, instead substituting a Lucasfilm to locking mechanism ..
Cat Person sinks its claws deep into the horrors of dating An archly-feminist Rashomon-inspired take on the “not all men” trope, CAT PERSON opens with arguably 2023’s most terrifying scene as, for a split second, we see Emelia Jones’ Margot standing blank-eyed beside an Icee machine and you think you’re watching another indescribably cringe-inducing Cineworld ..
Horror’s Having Quite A Year, Isn’t It? Horror’s having quite a moment, isn’t it? I mean, obviously it being October the genre’s enjoying its usual annual renaissance, rising from its dormant phase to chill us to the core much the same way Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas” does every December (and, let’s be ..
Family matters as Blue Beetle narrowly avoids being a barrio bust Is it the end of the old or the beginning of the new? It doesn’t really matter as BLUE BEETLE is so studiously agnostic that James Gunn, Peter Safran and David Zaslav can take their sweet time making that decision while they plot the ..
She’s back! Sweetie G returns from beyond the veil to talk to us about Talk To Me Hey folks, Sweetie G here, long time no read!! Yep, it’s been a while since I was last inspired to put fingers to keyboard, but here I am, ready to talk to you about TALK TO ME, the ..
Bravura stunt work fails to mitigate the shortcomings in plot and dialogue that cause MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – DEAD RECKONING PART ONE to self-destruct. With Daniel Craig’s Bond having abdicated the long-held action crown in a Quixotic quest for prestige picture legitimacy, Tom Cruise has deftly manoeuvred and manipulated his one enduring franchise onto the vacant ..
Transformers: Rise Of The Beasts sinks to some pretty familiar lows It doesn’t seem that long ago that Travis Knight restored the long-lost spark to the Transformers franchise with BUMBLEBEE, erasing the excremental excesses of the Michael Bay era and starting the story afresh by paring it back to a very human-centred story featuring shapeshifting ..
Fast X is very much Dominic Toretto’s Infinity War For a franchise which features more heel/ face switcheroos than WWE (and, to be fair, more than its fair share of WWE alumni too), it’s fun to see it push its villains so far that even the seemingly endless Fast & Furious family willingness to embrace ..
Blumhouse replatforms screentime pearl-clutching with uncanny valley girl M3GAN It’s been a while since the concept of the singularity troubled the box office but with the seemingly unstoppable rise of AI-powered well, everything, permeating mainstream consciousness, it doesn’t take much intelligence – artificial or otherwise – to predict that Blumhouse, the McDonalds of horror, would ..
