Film

We have had big revivals of Sherlock Holmes in recent years so now comes the inevitable big screen revival of another staple of detective fiction and Sunday evening TV murder mysteries: Hercule Poirot. This adaptation of one of Agatha Christie’s ...

A recent query on social media about a children’s Halloween costume and the ethics of dressing a child up like a character from another culture sparked a typically lengthy discussion of the various interpretations of the term “cultural appropriation”. In ...

After Thor: The Dark World, things could only get better. I’m glad that Marvel is opening up to slightly auteur directors like James Gunn and Taika Waititi, it has at least made for superhero films that aren’t all exactly the same. ...

Crime dramas always strike me as struggling on the big screen. It is undoubtedly an opinion arising from my upbringing, but a detective story is often well-suited to the serialised format of TV. The limited running time of a film ...

Censorship! State execution! Gulags! This is the stuff great comedy is made of. The Death of Stalin is an adaptation of a French graphic novel being brought to the screen by satirical maestro Armando Iannucci. The helmsman behind The Thick ...

With a new latter-day sequel trudging across cinema screens, we are provided with a great opportunity to review the iconic cyberpunk noir masterpiece Blade Runner. Established now with a pristine reputation, the film was initially released to critical derision and ...

I went on a journey with Blade Runner 2049. As it started, I thought this uncalled-for sequel might hold some promise. Then I revised that to think it was competent but ultimately unnecessary. Then I had a growing sense of ...

The new Star Trek films baffle me. They have proved popular despite their obvious lack of quality. They are incomprehensible to newcomers because they rely so heavily on material from the established franchise, and they are a slap in the ...

I have rarely been so disappointed with a film. Not only did I love Kingsman: The Secret Service but the sequel opens with a fight scene played out to Prince’s Let’s Go Crazy. How could a film that used Prince ...

I’m not sure how I managed to avoid watching this film for so long. It isn’t as though it is an under the radar classic. For years, friends have been lecturing me about watching it, which prompts me (contrary bastard ...