Game on! Spielberg’s Ready Player One is a delicious digital malt shake with cream and a cherry on top.

Here is my relatively spoiler free review of Ready Player One…

Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames reignited

In my finale communiqué from the Cinema Rediscovered festival in Bristol I take a look at Lizzie Borden’s 1983 film Born in Flames. This was a major discovery for me, Lizzie Borden being a director I was not that familiar with having only seen her film Working Girls some 25 years ago whilst a student. 

THIS GREEN UNPLEASANT LAND – THE VISIONS OF NIGEL KNEALE

With the release of an updated version of the excellent biography Into the Unknown – the fantastic life of Nigel Kneale (Andy Murray, Headpress) this seems like a good time to burrow deep into my archives and exhume an article I wrote for the now defunct digital magazine Cult TV Times. Enjoy…

To The Wonder – Midnight Special is an emotional science fiction thriller

I’ve never quite clicked with director Jeff Nichol’s highly regarded previous films, but his latest is a bold move into the mainstream. Review after the jump.

Infini! Infini! I’ve got it in for Infini! – Review

Australian movie Infini invites audiences to get lost in space again.

Favourite films – Invasion of the Body Snatchers

It’s a commonly recited refrain that the film industry’s fondness for recycling material is stifling creativity, or more simply ‘remakes suck ass dude’, but Jack Finney’s 1954 science fiction novel Invasion of the Body Snatchers has proved fertile soil for the cultivation of American nightmares. Don Siegel’s 1956 film slyly presented a paranoia that can be read as either fear of communism or McCarthyism. In Philip Kaufman’s 1978 remake this becomes something else, expressing a fear of conformity, urban alienation, the breakdown of community and the social paranoia of being an outsider.

Review – Mad Max: Fury Road

What an extraordinary career In filmmaking George Miller has had. After breaking onto the international film scene with the rough but poetic exploitation film Mad Max in 1979 (one of the few science fiction films admired by J G Ballard), Miller followed up with one of the greatest sequels ever made Mad Max 2 in 1981 (the film was retitled The Road Warrior in the US as the first film had been a flop, largely due to an atrocious American dub that wiped out the Australian accents and made the then 23 year old Mel Gibson sound he was a 50 year old with emphysema). These two films – along with the slightly too slick third instalment Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome in 1985 – should have set Miller up as one of the premier action directors of his generation. Instead he turned his hand to big-budget satire with The Witches of Eastwick, adult drama with Lorenzo’s Oil, and children’s animation Happy Feet (for which he won an Oscar). He also produced a string of Australian features and TV, and wrote the screenplay for Babe. Eclectic ought to be his middle name.

Scraping the barrel – Her

Honestly, I’m actually trying to be a more positive critic in 2015, but now that my former reviews from the Chris and Phil Presents site (RIP) have disappeared, it was inevitable I would have to republish my outraged review of Spike Jonze’s film Her, a movie which frankly irritated the piss out of me. Here it is, unchanged, unexpurgated, (possibly unhinged?). Bear in mind this was published about a year ago on the eve of the film’s UK release.

Don’t be a dick, Riddick!

Intro

The spur to starting this blog was the shuttering of the website Chris and Phil Presents, a site for which I had wrote a ton of stuff over the years. We don’t leave much of a mark on the world, so faced with mine evaporating like so much digital smoke I started this blog.

As is the nature of the fast moving world of show, some of the stuff I wrote has rather gone past its sell-by date, but with the recent [mild] controversy over a particular sexist joke in the movie Kingsman: The Secret Service (one I commented upon in my review along with everybody who saw it and quite a few who didn’t) reminded me of a blog I had written after seeing the sci-fi sequel Riddick.

Favorite films – The Stone Tape

Originally broadcast by the BBC on Christmas Day in 1972, The Stone Tape is part of a tradition of seasonal ghost stories that included such classic televisual chillers as The Signalman and Whistle and I’ll Come to You.