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…
It has been seven years since the reboot of the Batman franchise and four years since the iconic second film in Christopher Nolan’s Batman saga; the haunting and astounding The Dark Knight. A film which included a posthumous Oscar winning performance from the late Heath Ledger, record breaking box office returns and left the Caped Crusader…
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…
Astonishingly prolific director Steven Soderbergh keeps on threatening to give up filmmaking for good. It’s unclear whether or not he is serious about this, or whether it will actually happen (a recent interview on Radio 4 suggested that he is now totally serious about retiring). I really hope this doesn’t happen, as Steven Soderbergh is…
This disastrous romantic comedy is loosely inspired by the far superior German film Run Lola Run. The practically non-existent story involves a woman named Lola (Ashleigh Sumner, who some may recognise from TV series The Event) running through San Francisco, desperate to make it to an important meeting. We are lead to believe that her…
Although decent, this remake fails to live up the dark tensions provided by Raimi’s 2002 film.
Fresh from Denmark, historical drama A Royal Affair tells the true story of a scandal that rocked Danish society in the late 18th century. Caroline (Alicia Vikander), whose elder brother became King George III, leaves her native England to marry Christian VII of Denmark (Mikkel Følsgaard). So set for life then? Well not quite. After…
Since the release of Michael Jackson’s concert-documentary movie This Is It in 2010, the genre has taken off as everyone from JLS to Justin Bieber realises there is money to be made, and Katy Perry is the latest member of pop royalty to release her own. Documenting her professional highs, and personal lows, the whole…
After a mere ten years, Columbia Pictures and Marvel decided it was time for a reboot in the Spider-Man franchise. For many of the audience members (myself including), Sam Raimi’s film from 2002 is still relatively fresh in people’s memory and many have questioned the need for the reboot of the series. This newest outing,…
Killer Joe is a furiously brilliant, astute and hypnotic 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…