Tag Archives: spy

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 ...

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 ...

Lorraine Broughton (Charlize Theron) is headed to Berlin, a hornet’s’ nest of intrigue, just as the Wall comes down in 1989. She has been sent by her MI6 taskmasters to recover that most easily misplaced of national secrets in the ...

It might simply been that I was spoiled by Tomas Alfredson’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, but why are there no good period spy dramas anymore? Last year’s wildly overpraised Bridge of Spies saw Spielberg provide an uncharacteristically humdrum affair. I’ll ...

Thank god we live in an age of digital film distribution because if Jason Bourne had come out in an earlier age, it would have been a horrific waste of celluloid. In the annals of unnecessary sequels, this probably won’t ...

Creating story to a set structure is nothing to sniff at. After all, it’s worked for Bernard Cornwell all these years. But after the fresh of breath air that was Skyfall, the familiar ground covered in Spectre tastes stale. There ...

In the war on original intellectual properties, we have the latest reinvention of a long dormant series in Guy Ritchie’s muddled spy flick The Man from U.N.C.L.E. The original show was a classic of the 60s Cold War spy craze, ...

Tom Cruise is a high-ranking member of an allegedly evil cult with widely known accusations of psychological and physical abuse, financial malpractice, and a tendency to sue anyone who criticises their shady dealings and crazy beliefs. I therefore find it ...

Kingsman: The Secret Service is brilliant. It’s fun, fast, clever, and original within a genre that tends to fall on its laurels. The film is undeniably British, but I do hope it does well with an international audience, as I ...