Category: Film Reviews

Humans really are an awful bunch, aren’t we? We fight, we steal, we beat each other down, and we never seem to learn from our mistakes. Of course, we don’t want to admit that we’re that bad. No, we just want to stick our head in the sand and ignore the truth. Sometimes it’s up to works of art and media to hold a mirror up to us and make us confront our ugly reflections. One work that does an excellent job of this is 1968’s Planet of the Apes.

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I put on Failure to Launch because I was looking for (and I quote) a “dumb and cosy movie”. Did I get what I was looking for? Yeah, pretty much.

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Ed Wood is kind of the “forgotten” Burton film. Everyone knows the Burton classics like Edward Scissorhands or Batman or Beetlejuice, but nobody really remembers Ed Wood – even though they really should do so.

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Weirdly, despite having a major in history, I’ve never gone in much for historical films (especially war ones). That being said, there are some historical war films that I do like: Hacksaw Ridge, Gallipoli, Dunkirk and 1917 probably the ones that most readily come to mind. The film Greyhound is not something that really piqued my interest, and after watching it, I remain thoroughly underwhelmed.

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The most generous way to describe the historical accuracy of 2019’s The King is “lukewarm at best”. The film, starring current Hollywood Golden Boy Timothée Chalamet as King Henry V, is (very) loosely based on several of the works of Shakespeare that chronicle the same period in Henry’s life.

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Outcast, a 2014 Chinese-American-Canadian film directed by Nick Powell, can be succinctly summarized in two words: a mess.

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I really wanted to like The Woman in the Window. I really did.

It’s got a great cast (Amy Adams, Gary Oldman, Julianne Moore… the list goes on!) and a great premise (someone trapped in their house witnesses something strange going on across the street).

Sure, I realised from nothing more than the Netflix description that this was essentially just Rear Window: 2021 Edition (or, even just a rip-off of Rear Window’s modern brother, Disturbia), but I was willing to put up with that. I like this kind of story enough to see it done multiple times over, and I figured anything helmed by Amy Adams is a pretty sure bet.

Unfortunately, I didn’t like The Woman in the Window nearly as much as I thought I would.

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When I was a teenager me and my best friend at the time used to go to Blockbuster Video (that’s how long ago this was) and rent several horror movies to watch on a Friday night every couple of weekends. I remember watching The Abandoned for the first time around ten years ago on one such occasion, and being thoroughly terrified by it.

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Remember Mad Max? He’s back, in Tom Hardy form.

Thirty years after the events of Beyond Thunderdome, Max returns in Mad Max: Fury Road, another dystopian jaunt through the Wasteland helmed by long-time series director George Miller.

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Aah, Beyond Thunderdome. Truly the misfit of the Mad Max franchise. The only one to put basically zero focus on cars, but shitloads of focus on actual shit. Also the only one with a tie-in single (it was 1985, after all). Beyond Thunderdome is a wild ride, but not in a good way. We’d better get started.

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