A Wrinkle in Time is the long-awaited cinema adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s1962 children’s sci fi fantasy novel. As director Ava DuVernay emphasised in a pre-movie address, the film is aimed at tweens and focused on their interests and concerns: identity confusion, bullies, first romance, the desire to see magic enter their dull suburban lives and the belief that their personal
Read moreStephen Spielberg’s Ready Player One is an enormous nerdgasm, a sprawling big screen video game stuffed with retro pop culture references and teen geek heroes. Based on the 2011 Ernest Cline novel, the film is a love letter to gamer culture which means some are going to adore it while others may find it alienating and headache-inducing. The film propels
Read moreOne of the favourite novelties of Marvel Comics is the superhero team-up edition where most of the big-name heroes depart their usual narratives to unite against an enormous muscly super villain. That’s the premise of the latest Marvel movie, the epic Avengers: Infinity Wars, a grand finale of sorts but not the end of the Avengers movie juggernaut. Here, Thanos, a
Read moreGhost In The Shell is an adaptation of a popular Japanese graphic novel although it looks like it was spliced together from the DNA of Blade Runner and RoboCop with a dash of The Matrix. Like those films, Ghost in the Shell is set within a futuristic dystopia in which people have literally been submerged in questionable technology. Within this
Read moreThe first two Alien films were so iconic that any sequels or prequels will inevitably carry a burden of expectation so weighty that even Dwayne ‘the rock’ Johnson would struggle to lift it. This partly accounts for the disappointment that will gnaw at your guts like the infamous title creature while watching the latest instalment in the franchise, Alien: Covenant
Read moreWe can almost hear the boardroom meeting: “that Titanic made a bundle and so did that Gravity let’s mash them together, throw in a couple of Hollywood’s hottest stars and it’s new Ferraris all round”. The result is Passengers a sci-fi/ adventure/ romance that should have been a moving and thrilling space adventure but winds up being surprisingly tepid. Chris
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