Andrew Osmond– Author –

(Judge Dredd Megazine, Rebellion) The cannily populist Attack the Block, by new director Joe Cornish, is about an interstellar first contact with the most feared life-forms in the universe. We are talking, of course, about London hoodies...

(Sight & Sound, BFI) Last August, IMAX cinemas around the world screened a special preview of Avatar, James Cameron’s first narrative film since Titanic (1997), sketching the story in a quarter-hour of footage. Here’s our human hero,...

Attack on Titan is getting a Hollywood remake - well, maybe. Andrew and Carlos chat about the implications.

(Judge Dredd Megazine, Rebellion) Insidious is from both the director and the writer of Saw, but don’t be misled. It’s a “things go bump in the night” affair with barely a drop of blood (although the one exception is very effective; a bl...

Clash of the Titans is a throwback to a throwback, not unusual for a fantasy film, but less predictable than the revivals of Star Wars and Indiana Jones for new generations. The first Clash of the Titans opened in summer 1981, on the sam...

(Judge Dredd Megazine, Rebellion) Tim Burton’s diabolically tedious Alice in Wonderland is the equivalent of watching videogame cut-scenes for 109 minutes. Wonderland has been the source or inspiration of great (or intermittently great) ...

(SFX, Future Publishing) Ant-Man starts with our hero, played by Paul Rudd, seeming hopelessly outmatched in a prison brawl with a mountain-sized convict. It foreshadows the challenges he’ll face when he’s insect-sized, dodging stamping ...

(Sight & Sound, BFI) Paris, sometime in the first half of the twentieth century. Friends Raoul and Emile make a delivery to the greenhouse/workplace of an eccentric scientist. While there, they accidentally mix potions; the explosive...

(This is my review of the first season for Neo magazine, Uncooked Media; my Neo review of the second season is below the first.) Aldnoah.Zero is set in an alternative present, after humans found a “Hyper Gate” on the moon left by aliens ...

(Sight & Sound, BFI) Ted is a boy in the plastic, highly polluted city of Thneed-ville, which he accepts as the normal world. However, he’s hopelessly smitten with an older girl, Audrey, who says she dreams of having a real tree in h...

(SFX, Future Publishing) At the start of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the First Avenger has been left behind by the world. (“I’m here to pick up a fossil,” quips Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow.) By the film’s end, that same wor...

(Sight & Sound, BFI - I also wrote an article on the film's production for the MangaUK blog.) I saw Disney’s CGI cartoon Big Hero 6 when it premiered at the Tokyo International Film Festival, promoted under its Japanese title Baymax....

(Sight & Sound, BFI) It’s sadly appropriate that a boy robot reject from a high-tech future world is the hero of a CGI cartoon that’s already flopped in America and Japan, the two countries he might call home. Astro Boy (Mighty Atom ...

(SFX Magazine, Future Publishing) This amiable French cartoon is part paranormal fantasy, part Batman and Dick Tracy pastiche. In Manhattan, a little boy is hospitalised (his bald head suggests leukemia). But he has a power - he can proj...

Oizumi Station is in northwest Tokyo, in the Nerima district, which was home to some of the oldest anime studios. Toei Animation is the biggest of them all, animating franchises from Dragon Ball to One Piece; it's still around today, unl...

My review of the first two Psycho-Pass: Sinners of the System films is on the AlltheAnime website.

(SFX, Future Publishing) The new Robocop has an impressive brain. We know because we see it on the big screen, being prodded and sutured by Doctor Gary Oldman with an insouciance to impress Peter Cushing. Another scene shows Robocop nake...

(Neo magazine, Uncooked Media) After Devilman Crybaby, Netflix’s next complete new anime series is the larkish, capering Kakegurui. It may feel very different from Crybaby but it prods those same guilty pleasure centres that got lots of ...

(Sight & Sound, BFI) The recent The Social Network showed how online communities can express dysfunctional, destructive and self-destructive personalities. Chatroom takes on the same theme, but in a manner that could be kindly called...

(SFX Magazine, Future Publishing) How do you solve a problem like Godzilla? We’re not asking how you kill the King of Monsters. Don’t be silly; he shrugs off bullets, treads on tanks and eats nukes sunny-side up. And as the original 1954...

My review of the first ten-part season of Matt Groening's Netflix series Disenchantment is on the AlltheAnime website. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gp_RnJcb8Ig

(Judge Dredd Megazine, Rebellion) Chronicle, a debut film by director John Trank, retells the Steven King Carrie story but with a male outsider. Andrew (Dane Dehaan) is a high-school geek with an abusive dad and terminal mother, who deci...

(Judge Dredd Megazine, Rebellion) Never Let Me Go is based on the acclaimed novel of the same name by British author Kazuo Ishiguro, best known for his period piece The Remains of the Day. Never Let Me Go is also a period piece of sorts;...

(Neo, Uncooked Media - I also have an article on the live-action Netflix version on the AlltheAnime site.) (Volume 1) If Stephen King scripted an anime, it might look like Erased, which Anime Limited is releasing in two six-part volumes....