‘Definitely the Joker’ If anyone who saw The Dark Knight is asked what they liked best about the film, this is almost always the response. The bar for playing a Batman villain was well and truly raised by Heath Ledger, immortalised not only on screen but off screen as his ‘Joker’ became his legacy to…
A woman believes her 17 year-old son has murdered a man. She covers up the killing the best she can, but the case is still investigated by the local police. To make matters worse, there is a tape of her son and the deceased guy having sex, and a group of criminals threaten to hand…
The Dark Knight’s flaws left Chris Dibsdall yearning for something more.
I love horror films, providing there is evident skill and purpose to the horror. But when I come across a movie that misuses the genre and exploits it, with no apparent artistic competence, I get very angry. 2007’s The Hills Have Eyes II is such a film. Alexandre Aja’s reworking of Wes Craven’s original The…
Michael Haneke is the king of uneasy cinema. This film, from 2001, is one of his strangest works (although saying that about a Haneke film is is like singling out a Transformers movie and labelling it the most stupid – the adjective is stitched into the cinematic territory). Code Unknown doesn’t try to tell a…
Sometimes the films that don’t work – the failures, the hit-and-misses, the ones that never quite manage to achieve what they set out to do – are the most interesting. This is how I feel about a much maligned film Exorcist II: The Heretic. As you can hopefully guess from the title, it is a…
Although decent, this remake fails to live up the dark tensions provided by Raimi’s 2002 film.
Whether you think it is brilliant popular fiction, a guilty pleasure, or just gutter trash, E.L. James’s Fifty Shades trilogy is a publishing phenomenon. Even before it became an explosive success in the UK, (it’s now the fastest selling adult paperback of all time) Hollywood studios were fighting to secure the rights to a film…
If you’ve never heard of Bill Hicks, I’m guessing you’ve heard of Muhammad Ali. That brash and forthright hero of boxing who was much more than just a sportsman; a social and political icon who through his actions, words and spirit, inspired millions. Though revered the world over and without a doubt “up there”, Ali…
Getting lost in hype, excitement and expectation in today’s tweeting, squeaking and beeping social networking society is as easy as a female of a nocturnal persuasion. It’s safe to say that Prometheus is just this, but instead of a calm transaction within its draped brothel, it thought it would be a good idea to steal…
Now I have entered the no-work haven of the Summer months, I have been catching up on some films I missed when they were released in cinemas. The latest bunch of films I have greedily consumed includes The Rite, an exorcism horror film. It tries its best at being both a thought-provoking story about the more controversial…
The original was a masterpiece, and a bloody tough act to follow, but this really sickeningly terrifying horror sequel is almost as good. When a man is murdered whilst taking part in a radio phone-in, Police officer Dennis Hopper convinces DJ and journalist Caroline Williams to use it as bait to catch the perpetrators. But…
Prometheus has managed to cultivate that kind of legendary cult following that movie studios dream of. During the lead up to its release, fans have been blogging, twittering, guessing and criticising, eating up all the manufactured pieces of viral marketing as they go. But as I watched Prometheus, I found it rather easy to forget…
As a self-confessed Marvel/Comic/Superhero fangirl, I was always going to enter the screening of Avengers Assemble with unrealistically high expectations, but after an altercation at TGI Friday’s which caused me to miss the first 20 seconds, I was immediately submerged into a world where the film’s stupid name (Avengers Assemble? Really?) really didn’t matter. Cue…