Justice League is the Worst DCEU Film Yet
Five films in, what does the DC Extended Universe represent?
A Goddess Among Us: Wonder Woman Entertains Despite Inability to Innovate
Is Wonder Woman the saviour of DC? Let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves.
The Hyper-Masculine Incoherency of Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is neither the hero the superhero genre deserves nor the villain it dreads. This is a film about two superheroes waging war with one another that’s similarly at war with itself, riven between competing narratives, commercial concerns and an overarching ambition that sees it striving for meaning before collapsing…
The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Strives for the Sleek Sexiness of the Sixties
Catching The Man from U.N.C.L.E. on the tail-end of a Mission: Impossible marathon brings into focus how different Guy Ritchie’s latest feels from both the average spy thriller and today’s typical blockbuster. This isn’t to say there’s anything especially innovative going on here – outside of the ‘60s setting, it’s a pretty standard spy story…
Dracula Untold (2014)
Where have all the superhero origin stories gone? Turns out they’ve transformed – in this case into a cloud of bats titled Dracula Untold. Like Noah, Maleficent and Hercules before him, Count Dracula gets the origin story treatment, hewing closer than ever to the ever-popular superhero genre. The armour worn by Vlad (Luke Evans) –…
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…
Black Sunday (1977)
As a disaster movie, Black Sunday feels almost quaint compared to the destruction reaped in modern superhero films; the film sees the Goodyear blimp descend upon the Superbowl, laden with plastic explosives, a threat level a few notches below Superman tossing Zod through Metropolis’s skyscrapers or the Chitauri laying waste to Manhattan. The difference between…
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