BY Our Editor ON 2016-09-07 Shane Black uses all his best tricks in The Nice Guys Whatever your feelings are about Iron Man 3, it was a hit, though if it wasn’t for Shane Black’s divisive addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe The Nice Guys would, probably never been made. Which would have been a shame as there’s few things that are more entertaining than Shane Black letting himself off the leash. So thank the Hollywood gods that when Iron Man 3 made a billion, this movie was rushed into production.
BY Our Editor ON 2016-09-07 X-Men: Apocalypse may be all over the place but it’s still a fun way to spend two and a half hours Director Bryan Singer may be the father of the modern superhero movie. Christopher Nolan may have perfected the medium with The Dark Knight Trilogy, but Singer was the man who started it all with the first X-Men film. From his first mutant film, the dark, flawed, but overall enjoyable X-Men, to X2, his bowing out of the franchise (resulting in the abomination that is X-Men: The Last Stand), and reinvigorating it as producer of First Class, and returning to the director’s chair for the excellent Days of Future Past, Singer has created a mammoth franchise that reboots, and corrects itself. There is no other movie franchise like it, and his latest instalment, X-Men: Apocalypse may be the most divisive of the bunch.
BY Our Editor ON 2016-09-07 The Matrix changed blockbuster filmmaking forever, just don’t mention the sequels 1999 sparked one of the weirdest movie trends, that of the office drone and the many possibilities around him. Office Space centred on an office worker who, through hypnosis and a lot of farce, coasted through his mind-numbing job by just not doing it. Fight Club showed an office worker violently try to reclaim his lost masculinity. None of these films come close to the weirdness of The Matrix, in which an office drone is in fact the most powerful being in the world, except his world is a lie. The Matrix, directed by the now Wachowski sisters, was a sophisticated blockbuster that challenged the very idea of reality.
BY Our Editor ON 2016-09-06 The Hateful Eight provides a Tarantino spin on the locked room mystery The Hateful Eight is a revisionist film, in fact all of Quinten Tarantino’s films are revisionist films. Each film has recognisable cinematic DNA yet Tarantino plays with convention to give us his own unique brand of American cinema. Think Reservoir Dogs cutting the robbery that in any other film would be the backbone of the plot, think of the scattered timeline of Pulp Fiction’s Altman-like ensemble piece, think of the love letter to kung fu movies that is Kill Bill with Uma Thurman in the Bruce Lee role, he even had Eli Roth kill Hitler. The Hateful Eight is no different. It’s recognisably a western, what with the old cloths, guns, and racial politics, but at its heart The Hateful Eight is an R rated Agatha Christie tribute about eight strangers brought together by a snowstorm and an evil woman.
BY Our Editor ON 2016-09-05 The Jodie Foster directed Money Monster is a good, old fashioned thriller You just don’t get movies like Money Monster anymore. Jodie Foster’s fourth feature film, after Little Man Tate, Home for the Holidays, and the Mel Gibson starring oddity that is The Beaver, doesn’t belong in the cinematic landscape of 2016, which is a good thing. This kind of mid budget thriller was last popular in the nineties, although Money Monster’s DNA stretches back to the seventies: specifically to two films by the master of media satire Sidney Lumet. Money Monster is the love child of Dog Day Afternoon, and Network. Let’s not get crazy though, while it’s a fine film, Money Monster is no way near as good as either of these classics.
BY Our Editor ON 2016-09-03 Midnight Special cements Jeff Nichols place as America’s most underrated genre filmmaker A recent trend in American independent films is becoming more, and more apparent: they love the genre films of the eighties. Film makers like Adam Wingard (You’re Next, The Guest), James DeMonaco (The Purge trilogy), and David Robert Mitchell (It Follows), are indebted to horror masters John Carpenter, and Wes Craven. Jeff Nichols has gone one better. The Arkansas-born filmmaker, whose first three films: Shotgun Stories, Take Shelter, and Mud are all intimate masterpieces of Southern living, with tinges of fantasy, and paranoia, has gathered a deserved reputation as one of America’s brightest new talents. Midnight Special, his first proper genre piece, should solidify this reputation and have bigger studios come calling. Nichols wears his influences on his sleeve for his fourth feature. There is the droning electronic beats of a John Carpenter soundtrack, there’s the lean filmmaking of the Halloween director, and a quality of hope that is more Spielberg that his contemporaries but with