Arctic (2018)
Arctic‘s survival thriller builds into an ode to resilience and dogged self-determination.
Doctor Strange (2016)
Don’t be fooled by the smoke and mirrors – beneath Doctor Strange’s shiny coat of paint is a vanilla origin story.
How Will Daniel Craig’s James Bond Be Remembered?
If you’ve paid any attention at all to Daniel Craig’s press tour for the new James Bond film, Spectre, you’d be aware that Craig is pretty well disenchanted with 007. Maybe “really fucking over it” is a better description. He’s described Bond as a “misogynist”, noting that “a lot of women are drawn to him…
The Salvation (2014)
The Salvation reminded me of Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns. Not, I should hasten to add, because it approaches the mastery of Leone’s films, but rather in the way a foreign filmmaker (director Kristian Levring is Danish) approaches an acutely American genre from a unique perspective. There are some Leone similarities in how Levring’s screenplay (co-written…
The 86th Academy Awards – Predictions and Thoughts
I’m not really that interested in getting too caught up in the Oscars fol-de-rol that consumes the critical community around this time of year. I read a lot about the Academy Awards because, well, it’s people getting passionate about film! People arguing emphatically about which film is better and the industry, about who will win…
The Top 10 (or 12) Episodes of Television in 2013
10. Spartacus: War of the Damned – “Victory” Not the last finale on this list, “Victory” is a triumphant conclusion to a slightly overstuffed season of the great, underrated Spartacus. With a substantial list of casualties, “Victory” was defined by tragedy and, yes, victory, even if that victory was a moral one, not born of…
Manhunter (1986)
Manhunter has much to recommend it; as the first adaptation of Thomas Harris’s books, it hasn’t had the same cultural impact of the superior Silence of the Lambs, but it benefits from Harris’s richly considered world, falling somewhere between fantasy and realism. Even without knowledge of Harris’s canon, the characters feel fully-developed, even in minor…
