I have a friend who saw the poster for Max Payne a couple of months in advance and got rather excited. She had worked out from the poster that it was some sort of hard-boiled cop or detective drama and was gritty and violent. As a hard-boiled fiction[…]

Hard to beat. Love and Honour the sadly generically titled final film in Yôji Yamada’s samurai trilogy is a sedate, old fashioned tale which features a blind swordsman. The ICA for some reason had to show it on DVD, whose reduced resolution ma[…]

Having read the late Stieg Larsson’s “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” (a ponderous Swedish whodunit filled with frozen countrysides, casual sex and endless cups of coffee) I found that as usual I had my finger on the caffeinated, S[…]

Role Models is another “crude with a heart” manchild US comedy, which combines sex obsession, with thirty-something slackerdom and Live Action Roleplaying to ramshackle but generally amusing effect.
You read that right. The plot of Role […]

The most obvious film to compare Trouble The Water, the Hurricane Katrina disaster documentary with is Spike Lee’s epic When The Levees Broke. Being considerably shorter by two and a half hours, you may be forgiven in thinking that Trouble The[…]

The Reader is not a biopic of folk singer and Fairground Attraction frontwoman Eddi Reader. Which is just as well as I do not believe Ms Reader’s life has involved being a concentration camp guard and toyboy taunting sexual predator. In Kate Wi[…]

Frank Miller’s film of the Spirit has been beaten to death by the press, which befits a film where ultra-violent beatings are the order of the day. Watching it out of curiosity it is interesting to see how much of this beating is due to
a) Fran[…]

(This entry crossposted with Blackbeardblog.)
It’s certain that Leonard Cohen’s song “Hallelujah” will be the Christmas #1. But which version? PR Media Blog reports on a Facebook campaign to put Jeff Buckley’s version at[…]

A bunch of FT writers and close associates have NEW BLOGS (or bloglike entities) which demand some of your attention: (more…)[…]

There are two great, if not stone cold classic, aspects to Oliver Stone’s W. Put aside the fact that Stone has somehow managed to wander back from the wilderness of his own self-indulgence and succeed in making entertaining a film no-one really wan[…]