Hereditary (2018)
Hereditary (2018) Ten minutes into writer-director Ari Aster’s debut feature film Hereditary I found myself recalling Orson Welles’s famous statement on his first film: namely, that it was like a boy getting the world’s biggest train set to play around with. There’s just this feeling that Aster is having such a great time trying out all these tricks, bells and whistles. Those opening shots are very good indeed,...
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018)
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) ‘’They’d all be dead by now, right?” asks one of the mercenary DNA-scavengers at the beginning of this fifth installment, as his team maneuver a small submarine into the lagoon that was home to the Jurassic theme park’s enormous Mosasaurus. What these guys are searching for are the bones of the hybrid Indominus rex from the previous outing. And while good old Indominus is...
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) 50th Anniversary Showing
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) 50th Anniversary Showing A good number of years ago, during one of its periodic returns to the big screen – something which alone points up the enduring popularity of this film – an ad campaign ran with the slogan: BEFORE STAR WARS THERE WAS AND ALWAYS WILL BE 2001: A SPACE ODDYSSEY. Well, it was catchy, I’ll give it that; but it was a bit misleading. In fact, I’d call it bloody well...
Stanley Kubrick : Filmworker (2018)
Existing in Stanley’s World: Filmworker (2018) When I first saw Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange I just sat there stunned, thinking that it had to be just about the worst film from a major director that I had ever seen. When Leon Vitali came to the end credits he said to the person with him that this was the man he wanted to work for. Different strokes and all that. As a young film nerd in the ‘70s Kubrick should have...
The Strangers: Prey at Night (2018)
The Strangers: Prey at Night (2018) I’ll never be able to listen to Kim Wilde’s ‘Kids in America’ in the same way, ever again. For most of writer-director Bryan Bertino’s 2008 debut The Strangers we were able to…just about…tell ourselves that these three masked figures who were invading a family home were — at the very worst — extremely sadistic pranksters. Talk about optimistic. Then that genuinely...
Nemo: The Roses of Berlin
Nemo: The Roses of Berlin As with Heart of Ice, the first of writer Alan Moore and artist Kevin O’Neill’s Janni Dakkar/Nemo outings, the slim (52 pages) volume at hand is enjoyable enough, even though it feels lightweight next to its big brothers in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen universe. Nemo: The Roses of Berlin moves forward thirty-five years to find Captain Janni nearing fifty, still plowing murderously away at...
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