Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales is yet another lumbering, plotless farce in what has to be one of the most undeservedly successful franchises in cinema history – first film excepted. These Pirate films should be rollicking campy adventures but they’re so waterlogged with cgi and so incoherently plotted that they lack both sense and charm. Also,
Read moreDirector Edgar Wright built his reputation on genre parodies, such as zombie spoof Shaun of the Dead, that were often funny and cartoonishly violent and which cleverly sent up the distinctively odd behaviours of that species known as the English male. His latest film, Baby Driver is neither a pastiche (despite recalling other films) nor is it an English lad
Read moreSo here it is, yet another Spider-Man reboot with a completely new cast, this time featuring young British actor Tom Holland in the title role. It seems there’s a global conspiracy to conscript everyone on earth into the role of Spider- Man. Although not quite an origin story or a remake, this film Spider-Man: Homecoming is, in many ways (which
Read moreWith funny, street smart, cartoonishly violent gangster movies like Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch Guy Ritchie was, in the 1990’s, being touted as Britain’s answer to Quentin Tarantino. Unfortunately, his recent, confusingly-plotted, over-the-top, near-indigestible offerings such as the Sherlock Holmes movies and the irritating Rock’n’Rolla have seen him become more like Britain’s answer to Michael Bay. Consequently,
Read moreHow do you stop a film about an accountant being a snoozefest? How about making him a superhuman killing machine. That is the dubious premise behind Gavin O’Connor’s moderately exciting, often confusing and occasionally silly hitman thriller The Accountant. Ben Affleck stars as the eponymous number and skull cruncher Christian Wolff a savant maths genius whose autism saw him persecuted
Read moreThe original Magnificent Seven is a Hollywood classic which transposed Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai to the wild west of America; Seven Samurai having itself been inspired by Hollywood westerns. Now director Anton Fuqua has remade The Magnificent Seven with a cast that includes Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt, Ethan Hawke, Haley Bennett and Peter Sarsgaard. Given the dire record of classic
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