Author: Barnaby Walter

After some rather less-than-mediocre offerings from the Marvel stable (last year’s Iron Man 2 being a recent low point), I was delighted to find that Thor, directed by Shakespeare god Kenneth Branagh, is not just a step in the right direction but an absolute feast of entertainment. Some expressed surprise when Branagh’s attachment to the […]

This sombre and meticulously filmed effort from French director Xavier Beauvois looks at the daily lives of a group of Trappist monks living in 1990s Algeria. They grow plants, they donate medical attention to those who need it, and they sell honey. This is all pleasant enough, but probably wouldn’t be enough to sustain a […]

William and Kate: The Movie. People couldn’t believe it when they heard it was actually happening. Some hoped it would be so bad it would swing round the whole 360° of awfulness and land in the area of good trashy entertainment, where other confectionary such as Mamma Mia! and Top Gun could keep it company. […]

Twilight 2.0? Barnaby Walter investigates…

This is director Brad Furman’s second feature film, adapted from a Michael Connelly bestseller by John Romano, and it places him promisingly high on the list of talents to watch. The Lincoln Lawyer is an assured, cool and stylish legal thriller with a smooth Matthew McConaughey in the title role. In fact, it’s McConaughey that […]

I have no idea why this didn’t get a Best Picture Oscar nomination this year, but it really should have done. Well, actually I have a pretty good idea why, but let’s not dwell on the Academy’s xenophobia, particularly when they’ve just awarded Britain rather nicely with their multiple awards for The King’s Speech. Animal […]

Can we really hate anything that Liam Neeson does?

The Adjustment Bureau, an adaptation of a 1950s short story by Philip K Dick, is a rather welcome surprise. Although it deals with a story that could have been pretentiously portentous (yes, Inception, I mean you) and self-indulgently nerdy, somehow it manages to escape this and give its audience a fun, coherent and thrilling story […]

This teen comedy-drama playfully adapted Choderlos De Laclos’ 1782 novel Les Liaisons Dangeureuses into a tale of sex, sluts and cocaine. Not that different from the source material then, but here the action is relocated to 1990s Manhattan and the drama kept mostly among carnal-obsessed upper-class teens. The traffic-stoppingly gorgeous Ryan Philippe plays the anti-hero. […]

Although comparisons to John Boulting’s 1947 adaptation of Brighton Rock are inevitable, this film still deserves to be judged in its own right as a separate and new interpretation of the classic Graham Green novel. However, this rehash of the story of young charismatic murderer Pinkie, here played by Sam Riley, and his dangerous relationship […]

How on earth did this happen? How did this get made? How can such a talented director (Clint Eastwood) and an experienced writer (Peter Morgan) come together to concoct such a baffling disaster of a film. Hereafter is terrible. I have to be blunt about it. It really is truly awful. The opening of the […]

When watching Black Swan, Darren Aronofsky’s new psychological thriller, there comes a point when you reach a cerebral fork in the road. One path stretching on ahead is labelled ‘Absolute bollocks’. The other is labelled ‘Absolute genius’. No, this isn’t an advert for a new variety of vodka – I’m trying to illustrate how, though […]