Exactly what writer/ director Damien Chazelle was trying to say with his latest film, Babylon, a wild sprawling, occasionally funny, often ridiculous, exhaustingly manic, yet emotionally hollow homage/satire/savaging of early Hollywood is not entirely clear. It’s as if he’s poured all his memories of film making and watching into a blender, mixed them with lurid fantasies of Hollywood’s debauched underbelly
Read moreThe first salvo in the Christmas movie wars for 2022, Violent Night unusually combines raunch comedy, hostage drama, violent (sometimes gory) action and the old redemption through the magic of Christmas fantasy. It’s a strange combo that recalls Die hard, Home Alone, Bad Santa and weirdly enough the skull-crunching Viking film The Norseman. David Harbour stars as a genuine Santa
Read moreWhile it’s filled with vivid, inventive images and while it touches on important themes such as family conflict, same sex relationships and environmental preservation, the Disney animated fantasy, Strange World isn’t as engaging as it might have been. It seems as if the filmmakers weren’t sure if they wanted to create an old school sci fi adventure like Journey To
Read moreGonzo sci fi comedy/drama Something in the Dirt sits at the low-budget, DIY end of the movie making spectrum. This is both a blessing and a curse as the film has a raw, freewheeling energy but also feels unfocused and leaves us with the gnawing sense that the opportunity for a much more interesting film has been missed. This is,
Read moreMrs Harris goes to Paris is a charming but very twee and often implausible feel-good comedy/drama. The film at times recalls movies like Hidden Figures, The Help and Pretty Woman as it features a working-class woman who’s ignored or looked down upon by society but proves astonishingly formidable and cleverer than those who see themselves as her superiors. There’s also
Read moreWith a string of successful and critically acclaimed films such as The Fighter, Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle, David O Russell was poised to become one of the defining film makers of the 2010’s. But after 2015’s Joy, he seemed to disappear from our screens and became the subject of reports of controversial on-set incidents. One of those confrontations
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