There’s a new movie version of Robin Hood about every 20 years and after the Errol Flynn classic they’ve become progressively sillier. Perhaps we’ve hit the nadir because it’s hard to imagine a version (Mel Brooks deliberately silly Robin Hood: Men in Tights aside) being more ridiculous than the latest one simply entitled Robin Hood. This film, from director Otto
Read moreThe multitude of recent Star Wars films are probably the premier examples of Gen X nostalgia mining as movie makers attempt to wrench every dollar from those greying, cashed-up children of the 1970’s. There’s probably no greater Gen X hero than Harrison Ford’s Han Solo, he’s almost a religious figure to many sci-fi fans. Depicting Solo’s younger days with a different
Read moreIsle of Dogs sees idiosyncratic director Wes Anderson make another foray into the world of stop motion animation. As with any Wes Anderson film enjoyment relies on a viewer’s attitude to his typically droll humour. Those who delight in quirky characters making ‘oh so ironic’ comments in expressionless voices will be in Heaven here while others may be grinding their
Read morePirates 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 moreExistential drama All Is Lost sees sole cast member Robert Redford play an unnamed yachtsman battling the elements and the threat of starvation and dehydration on a sinking yacht in the Indian Ocean. As the story of a marooned person struggling for survival, the film evokes comparisons with Gravity and Life of Pi but this is a far more restrained,
Read moreKon Tiki has nothing to do with drunken Aussies on package overseas holiday tours. Instead, it’s a dramatisation of the amazing journey taken across the Pacific Ocean in 1947 by Norwegian archaeologist Thor Heyerdahl. Thor believed that, a thousand years ago, the descendants of present day Polynesians journeyed to the pacific islands from South America rather than from Asia as was
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