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…
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…
Where T.S. Eliot found fear in a handful of dust, Christopher Nolan finds it in huge clouds of the stuff. Dust storms are consuming America’s failing agrarian communities decades from now. Blight ravages the planet’s few remaining crops as that dust brings illness and despair. This is a pre-apocalyptic world, a wasteland upon which mankind…
The Trip to Italy is a hard film to dislike. Sure, your jealousy of Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan might curdle into distaste. They’re both charming fellows, talented (and affable, if you believe Brydon), but when they get to make a television series-cum-feature film that sees them traipse around the most picturesque locales in Italy,…
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…
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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