Live-Action Films– category –

(Judge Dredd Megazine, Rebellion) James Gunn’s Super is distinguished straight off by its opening titles, an overwrought, very funny, crayola-violent cartoon. Director James Gunn could have been one of the kids in Super 8; according to h...

(SFX Magazine, Future Publishing) This ill-famed film folly from Donnie Darko’s Richard Kelly has two advantages on DVD. In the cinema, you were stuck with the Rock, Justin Timberlake, Sarah Michelle Geller and their fellow thespians dis...

I wrote a review of Alita: Battle Angel for the AllTheAnime website.

The following retrospective on the film was published in SFX Magazine, Future Publishing. I also wrote a piece focusing on the Battle Royale novel for the Manga Entertainment blog. Half asleep, Japanese author Koshun Takimi envisioned a ...

(Judge Dredd Megazine, Rebellion) Gantz is a live-action film version of a manga strip that, even by Japanese standards, is a long runner. It started in 2000 and continues today after more than 350 episodes, written and drawn by Hiroya O...

(Judge Dredd Megazine, Rebellion) The Cabin in the Woods (out now), produced by Joss Whedon, directed by his former Buffy collaborator Drew Goddard, and written by both of them, has had a favourable reception from reviewers. The film is ...

(Sight & Sound, BFI) Following The Truman Show (1998), The Matrix (1999) and The Village (2004), City of Ember returns to Plato’s fable of the cave, his allegory for how humans are sealed within a deceptive, false reality. Gil Kenan’...

(Sight & Sound, BFI) The new Indiana Jones film starts in a veritable museum to modern myth. It’s a military warehouse in Area 51, hallowed ground for UFOlogists and conspiracy nuts. The set is a reconstruction of one in the closing ...

(Judge Dredd Megazine, Rebellion) “This place is the arsehole of the world.” Such is a Roman’s unflattering appraisal of the barbaric country that’ll one day be Scotland, still holding out against Emperor Hadrian. Romans go in; the savag...

(Sight & Sound, BFI) Phuket, six months after the Asian tsunami. A couple, Paul and Jeanne, are devastated by the disappearance of their young son, Joshua, in the disaster. Jeanne sees video footage shot in Burma, and insists that a ...

(Judge Dredd Megazine, Rebellion) Drag Me to Hell is about director Sam Raimi’s long-awaited return to horror after spending the 2000s web-slinging. But let’s be honest. If Raimi really wanted to return to his true indie horror roots, th...

(SFX Magazine, Future Publishing) You’re reading SFX, which means you’re almost certainly not the target audience for Devil’s Due. This fright film is aimed at teenagers – particularly teenage girls - who haven’t seen many horror picture...

(Sight & Sound, BFI) Philip K Dick died three months before the US release of Blade Runner, the film based on his 1968 science-fiction novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. But what he had seen impressed him. He described the fo...

(Judge Dredd Megazine, Rebellion) After the accomplished Carriers at the end of last year – the one in which Star Trek’s Chris Pine was an utter bastard on a plague-emptied world – it’s heartening to see another earnest apocalypse that d...

(Judge Dredd Megazine, Rebellion) “John Carter of Earth? John Carter of Mars sounds much better.” So the titular hero of the planetary-romance screen blockbuster John Carter renounces his birthworld and homo sapiens peers, as Sam Worthin...

(Judge Dredd Megazine, Rebellion) Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale is a completely different kind of “horror.” Directed by newcomer Jalmari Helander, it’s close – though perhaps not close enough, commercially speaking – to Joe Dante fare s...

My article on the multi-choice Black Mirror film "Bandersnatch", and its potential implications for anime, is on the AllTheAnime website. [amazon_link asins='B07MFFZ3X6' template='ProductGrid' store='anime04c-21' marketplace='UK' link_id...

(SFX Magazine, Future Publishing) Look, just ignore our star rating for the moment, okay? Antichrist is the kind of film that many viewers will give zero stars, or minus five stars, and no doubt the enfant terrible director Lars von Trie...

(SFX, Future Publishing) The granddaddy of silver-screen dystopias, Fritz Lang’s silent epic Metropolis returns to cinemas in a new version restoring twenty-five minutes lost for most of a century. That Metropolis is a colossus of cinema...

(SFX, Future Publishing) In space, no-one should be able to hear other people eating popcorn, or slurping soda, or locking lips with one another. For all these reasons, watching Gravity at home has advantages, removing the multiplex audi...

(Judge Dredd Megazine, Rebellion) Rise of the Planet of the Apes reflects the human/sentient ape condition by being both ingenious and dumb, sometimes at the same time. Directed by Britain’s Rupert Wyatt, it’s a second-try reboot, follow...

(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,...

(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...