Quoting other movies is a bog standard way of getting admittedly sometimes shoddy secondhand laffs. Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle/Get The Munchies (delete as appropriate) turns an entire film out of this, but not in a Scary Movie derivative w[…]

DON’T BORE US
DON’T WATCH THE CHORUS
Perhaps it is a testament to the real poverty in French cinema at the moment that the really big box office successes from over the channel seem to be stuffed to the gills with cute kids. The Chorus is[…]

Oh, and Hitch is the first Hollywood film to really rip-off The Office, in as much as it shows Hollywood has discovered just how funny bad dancing can be. And that is a dead horse flogged over most of the credits (where we also get to experience how […]

Love, Sex and Watching (Love and Sex*)
The tagline of Kinsey is “Let’s talk about sex”. And they do. Zoologically. Kinsey is one of those films you can admire rather than love. It is stuffed to the gills with interesting facts, figures […]

The special effect occupies a unique space, albeit an almost always pre-defined one which is rarely deviated from.
Unlike other constructions of illusion and artifice, the job of the SFX maestro is never to actually trick. Their job is ostensibly to […]

Cinema: Still Dying After All These Years
“Cinema’s 100 years seem to have the shape of a life cycle: an inevitable birth, the steady accumulation of glories and the onset in the last decade of an ignominious, irreversible decline. It&#82[…]

You Won’t Find Me in the Matinee
Far more than attitues to on-screen sex, the 9 Songs saga has shown up reviewers’ difficulties with music. The issue is key in 9 Songs because in some ways it’s a concert film. Some reviews have atte[…]

PORCO ROSSO
dir. Miyazaki Hayao
Some friends of mine have been Miyazaki freaks for a long time but I don’t envy them their familiarity with the older films because encountering them for the first time each means a freshness that I can savor &#8[…]

All the papers yesterday were stuffed to the gills with their tributes to cricketing god-bothra Davey Sheppard, they missed out the death of one of our most loved broadcasters. Perhaps “just” having a distinctive voice seems a bit of a mi[…]

Somersault is a female coming of age drama. Of course in the cinema no-one comes of age like people in real life. For us it was a few weekends hanging around phoneboxes with three litres of MAX cider and then a fumble at a mates party. In the cinema […]