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The Hateful Eight is the Right Kind of Trouble
Shortly after the intermission of the 70mm roadshow presentation of The Hateful Eight, writer and director Quentin Tarantino narrates a recap of the film’s events. It’s a moment of excitement as the...
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How to Get Rich with a Conscience in The Big Short
The Big Short is a nod along film. Knowing the outcome of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2007/08 and its catastrophic fallout, the narrative is defined by an eventuality so the emphasis of the...
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The Caged Heat of ‘Deadpool’
How do you hide that another comic book movie is being churned out with an origin story, revenge plot and a bland destructive finale? With jokes, of course, meta-jokes that will seem fresh to anyone...
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Monthly Movie Debrief: February Edition
The Debrief podcast is a little like a Backstreet Boy, it’s back! Film critic Blake Howard and I are returning to the show but we’re making it a monthly affair this year. Each episode will focus on a...
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The Prestigious Eye-Roll of Hail, Caesar!
The Head of Physical Productions at Capitol Pictures, Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), sits down with a group of religious luminaries from different faiths to get their opinion on the script for the...
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The Pre-Trump Paranoia of 10 Cloverfield Lane
Spoiler warning for this review because this is a very spoiler sensitive film so you just have to assume it contains spoilers even if they’re not technically spoilers, but they probably are, so it’s...
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Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, a False Promise
Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice is built on the promise of a fight. It’s not Batman and Superman, its Batman verses Superman. The iconic DC Comics’ characters have to get punchy because director,...
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The Jungle Book is a New Chapter in Cinematic Enchantment
‘Filmed in downtown Los Angeles’ is one of the final credits that rolls past at the close of The Jungle Book. When not completely in awe of The Jungle Book, spare moments will be spent puzzling over...
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The Dysfunctional Wholesomeness My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2
A quarter of the way through My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 it becomes clear that you are witnessing something slightly rare. Not only are there multiple female characters actually talking to each other;...
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Captain America: Civil War is All Glory and No Guts
Team Captain America (Chris Evans) and team Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) clash in a spectacular airfield battle sequence in Captain America: Civil War. A majority of Marvel Studios’ roster of...
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Midnight Special and the Tax of Parenthood
Quicker than you can say ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph’ you’re in the thick of an old parenting allegory in Midnight Special. Two parents (Michael Shannon and Kirsten Dunst) are trying to protect their...
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The Hubris of X-Men: Apocalypse
Comic book movies have reached a point in our culture where a filmmaker like Bryan Singer (directing his fourth X-Men movie) thinks he’s untouchable enough with the material to feature a scene where...
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The Savagery of Class Warfare in High-Rise
We’ve been conditioned by films to be terrified of perfection, sometimes depicted as paradise, a concept so entrancing on the surface with something usually rotting beneath the surface. In Ben...
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The Comical Pandemonium of The Nice Guys
Expect the unexpected in The Nice Guys, a crime tale that leaves the screwball comedy bruised and bloody with a retro reinvention of sorts. It’s a film where characters jump over walls expecting a...
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Green Room: No Posers
“Remember: it’s not a party, it’s a movement”, the leader of a group of skinheads, Darcy (Sir Patrick Stewart), tells a mosh pit as he clears people out of a bar in the middle rural Portland so his...
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Hunt for the Wilderpeople and the Discomfort of Being Affable
Heart-warming, sweet, enjoyable, pleasant, funny, likeable and thoughtful, you’ll hear all these things about Hunt for the Wilderpeople, and it’s all true; like a thesaurus of goodwill waiting to be...
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Girl Asleep gets bittersweet with maturity
There’s an arms race to adulthood when you’re a teenager. There’s a point where teens fight hard and fast to shed being viewed by the world as a child; their protest placard would be ‘we demand to be...
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Warcraft, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing
The odd thing about films based on videogames is the desire to choose the passive path when engaging with something drawn from an interactive medium. Why be the witness when you can be the protagonist?...
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The Dream of the Nineties is Alive in Independence Day: Resurgence
“They like to get the landmarks”, David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum) says as Dubai’s Burj Khalifa Tower falls from the sky to crush the London Bridge in Independence Day: Resurgence. Set and released...
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Ghostbusters lights em’ up
In 1984’s Ghostbusters, one of the advertising slogans for the group was ‘we’re ready to believe you’; in 2016’s Ghostbusters the appropriate slogan for the all-female crew would be ‘why won’t anyone...
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