Godzilla II: King of the Monsters is a Disastrous Failure
This is a film about mega-monsters wreaking havoc at a catastrophic scale, but there’s no weight to this thing; it’s limp and incoherent.
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom – the Park is Gone, and So is Any Modicum of Intelligence
Perhaps if Fallen Kingdom had nothing to do with Jurassic Park – if it were, say, titled Dinosaur Adventure – I could’ve enjoyed it. At least on the level that you enjoy an incredibly stupid film.
A Quiet Place (2018)
If you want carefully-crafted scares built from a unique premise, you should venture into A Quiet Place.
Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates (2016)
Another Apatow-esque comedy where attractive people goof around, do drugs and learn lessons. Also, spoilers: Zac Efron takes his shirt off.
Accessibility and Culture in Hunt for the Wilderpeople
New Zealand writer-director-actor Taika Waititi has always had a quirky comedic streak. With his latest, Hunt for the Wilderpeople, he’s closest to a defining style that can easily translate across a variety of audiences. That might be why he’s been selected to helm the next instalment of Marvel’s Thor franchise. His first feature film Eagle…
Defending Jurassic World or: Do Critics Need To Justify Liking Bad Movies?
Everyone seems to love Jurassic World. It’s earned a respectable seventy-so percent on Rotten Tomatoes, that famously flawless barometer of taste, and pretty much everyone I’ve chatted to about the film thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Everyone seems to love the film; everyone except precisely every film critic I’ve spoken to about it. My conversations –…
Jurassic World (2015)
Like most prepubescent boys (and girls) in the early ‘90s, I was obsessed with Jurassic Park. I can still vividly remember the first time I saw the movie – perhaps my earliest clear memory of a movie theatre – clutching my armrests in fear as an attempt to transport velociraptors went horribly wrong. By the…
Ex Machina (2015)
Alex Garland’s work as a novelist (The Beach, Coma) and screenwriter (28 Days Later, Sunshine) is, at its best, defined by a careful command of tone balanced with obvious intelligence. It should not come as a surprise that Ex Machina, Garland’s first time behind the director’s chair, demonstrates these qualities in abundance. This sparse sci-fi…
Godzilla (2014)
Godzilla is an anti-blockbuster, repurposing and reinventing the grammar of big budget disaster films to produce a film that is aesthetically and ideologically compelling, if inconsistently entertaining. A dense evocation of the tragic scale of environmental and nuclear cataclysms, the film’s steadfast refusal to focus on its human characters, instead contemplating global devastation, is hardly…
The Friday the 13th Series
Yesterday was Friday the 13th, and I took the opportunity to maximise my school holidays by sitting down with a few beers to watch the entirety of the Friday the 13th slasher series. Well, the first eight films at least: I left out Jason Goes to Hell, Jason X, Freddy vs Jason and the execrable…
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