It’s been a big year for Stephen King adaptations about people in deadly foot races. Earlier, we had the impressively gruelling and poignant The Long Walk and now comes The Running Man, not only a King adaptation but a remake of the 1987 Arnie film. The original film was an entertainingly silly piece of glossy 80’s sci fi action that
Read moreThe Gen X franchise regeneration continues with a surprisingly entertaining addition to the sci fi action franchise Predator in Predator: Badlands. As with the Terminator movies, what was once the otherworldly villain has now become the hero as the Predator known as Dek (New Zealand actor Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi), who is a member of the a Yautja people, is at the
Read moreThe Fantastic Four has been the problem child of the Marvel cinema family. There have been two previous false starts with the 2005 film starring Chris Evans and Jessica Alba and the 2015 reboot starring Miles Teller and Kate Mara which began promisingly before weirdly falling apart half way through. Now, in the wake of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s takeover
Read moreKorean writer/ director Bong Joon Ho’s latest excursion into misanthropic weirdness, Mickey 17 is certainly ambitious, mixing science fiction, jet black comedy, farce, action and political satire. That, however, is its problem, the film is a mess. Mickey 17 flails about in all directions never settling on a clear or satisfying approach and it isn’t especially funny, thrilling or politically
Read moreThe inventive, witty, energetic and occasionally gory Companion from writer/ director Drew Hancock is an early instalment in what will no doubt be a growing movie subgenre, the ‘personal robot thriller’. Iris (Sophie Thatcher) is a young woman who we see at the start of the film in a ‘meet cute’ at a supermarket with the goofy Josh (Jack Quaid,
Read moreThe original Alien from 1979 was a masterpiece of production design that infused Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett’s ‘haunted house in space’ concept with Ridley Scott’s remarkable aesthetic sense. James Cameron’s 1986 sequel, Aliens, while lacking the original’s eloquent artistry, inventively expanded some its ideas and reworked the concept into a brutally efficient, white knuckle action film. After two reasonably
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