Category: Reviews
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From A To Bond: Casino Royale
Which one is this? The reboot. Who’s who in this one? Craig (Bond); Dench (M); Wright (Leiter). Where did you first encounter this one? On release to theatres in 2006. Who’s the bad guy, and what does he want? Mads Mikkelsen as the villainous Le Chifre, who weeps blood and wants to use the poker…
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Review: THE DARK KNIGHT RISES
“But the Joker cannot win,” a broken and defeated Batman pronounced at the end of The Dark Knight, conjuring a lie which drives the engine of The Dark Knight Rises. Terrorists always do win, is the problem; their part of the job is easy. All they have to do is shatter the certainty at the…
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Tim Burton’s BATMAN RETURNS: A Look Back
“The Bat, The Cat, The Penguin,” the movie posters snarled in the summer of 1992, and Batman Returns did not disappoint; here was a Gotham bestiary par excellence. If the task of sequelizing Batman was an inherently thankless one – Tim Burton almost didn’t take the job, and audiences did not take to Returns as…
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Tim Burton’s BATMAN: A Look Back
Batman arrived at the exact right moment in my young life to become the Thing With Which I Was The Most Obsessed for the entirety of the subsequent six or seven years. It eventually took, I think, about a year of Batman Forever hangover to finally cure me of the disease. When the first Batman came…
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My Week With Alien, Part 5: PROMETHEUS
Originally published at The Substream. Spoilers. Thrilling and dangerous, Ridley Scott’s Prometheus is the vigorous work of a mature director, returning with terrifying intelligence to the rigours and riddles of long-ago dreams. The film does as advertised. It is hard sci-fi, thickly woven with ideas. It scours the corners of the Alien taxonomy in order…
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My Week With Alien, Part 4: ALIEN RESURRECTION
Originally published at The Substream. The dirty little secret at the heart of dirty little Alien Resurrection is that for all its marketing claims to the contrary, and for all of Joss Whedon’s “there’s dead and then there’s dead” reverse-engineering, the fourth and final proper Alien movie does not resurrect the Alien franchise at all…
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My Week With Alien, Part 3: ALIEN3
Originally published at The Substream. What then, Alien3? It is both the best and the worst of the saga, all rolled into one profoundly uncomfortable ball; it is the signature emergence of one of the most talented directors working in Hollywood, and one of the worst sequels ever made. It is, beyond any other considerations,…
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My Week With Alien, Part 2: ALIENS
Originally published at The Substream. With the first film, Alien became a classic; with the second, for good or ill, Alien becomes a franchise. This is beside the point for me: what I find most rewarding about all four Alien films is the degree to which this series, in its every iteration (and like the creature…
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My Week With Alien, Part 1: ALIEN
Originally published at The Substream. I stand by the Alien films. Yes, even that one. Yes: that one too. What eventually becomes clear in looking at Alien, Aliens, Alien3 and Alien Resurrection is that each one is something unique and extraordinary in its own way; the first two might both be classics of science fiction,…
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