Live-Action Films– category –

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 ...

(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...

(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...

(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...

(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;...

(Judge Dredd Megazine, Rebellion) Final Destination 5 opens with a set-piece spectacular around a high road bridge, and anyone with a passing acquaintance with the series won’t need telling what happens. Oh, all right. The bridge falls d...

(Sight & Sound, BFI) Berlin, the 1940s. Eight year-old Bruno is the son of a German officer. Bruno’s father is promoted and takes his family to a forbidding country house staffed by soldiers. Bruno, a dreamer who loves adventure book...

(Sight & Sound, BFI) Following a hostile response to The Golden Compass (2007), the last big fantasy film, the fleet-footed The Spiderwick Chronicles has enjoyed a much warmer reception in America. The film is produced by the Nickelo...

(Judge Dredd Megazine, Rebellion) Sherlock Holmes, like Dracula and Tarzan, is a pop-culture universe unto himself, but he may not last forever. The last Holmes films I remember in cinemas were Disney’s cartoon Basil the Great Mouse Dete...

(Judge Dredd Megazine, Rebellion) The Last Airbender's title Dalai Lama-like hero automatically reincarnates each time he or she dies. Many critics would agree that Shyalaman’s career needed a similar renewal after Lady in the Water and ...

(SFX Magazine, Future Publishing) The sign on the soundstage door warns, “Wolves on set.” Within, the fairy-tale forest is darkened. This is a night scene, in which scared peasants are trying to lure one of the predators into a trap. A h...

(Judge Dredd Megazine, Rebellion) The Running Man, Stephen King’s 1982 novella about a gameshow which kills its contestants, ended with its hero grinning through a mask of blood and giving the TV producer the finger, before spoiler spoil...

(Judge Dredd Megazine, Rebellion) The day it was announced that Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson would make a motion-captured, computer-animated blockbuster out of Herge’s venerable Tintin, a film journalist of my acquaintance said his...

(Judge Dredd Megazine, Rebellion) Let Me In (out now), as readers of this column must surely know, is the English-language remake of the hugely acclaimed Swedish film, Let the Right One In. It’s a lyrical tale about a tender and bloody l...

My article on the original Japanese Godzilla is on the MangaUK blog. https://youtu.be/KNDH2mX8wf4 [amazon_link asins='B000CFX5M8' template='ProductAd' store='anime04c-21' marketplace='UK' link_id='d0ced917-9c4a-11e8-80d7-4d46f2def6d7']

(Judge Dredd Megazine, Rebellion. Apologies for the embarrassing error in the text - as every Thrones fan knows, Ned Stark is most definitely not the brother of Robert Baratheon, although the script specifies they're close _like_ sibling...

(Judge Dredd Magazine, Rebellion) So let’s play fantasy Harry Potter. Imagine, if you will, that the seven J.K. Rowling books could each be filmed by a different director with a specialism in fantasy and a rep for quirk. Imagine a dream ...

(Sight & Sound, BFI) Texas, the present. At an army base, a secret transaction goes awry and a deadly gas is released. Nearby, go-go dancer Cherry Darling encounters ex-boyfriend El Wray. She accepts a lift from him, but they’re atta...

(SFX Magazine, Future Publishing) You wait years for a serious-minded space blockbuster, then two arrive almost at once. Following Gravity, a tight adventure story where people in space struggle to get back to Earth, here’s Christopher N...

(Judge Dredd Megazine, Rebellion) In Roland Emmerich’s new disaster epic, 2012 is the year when our time’s up. The world’s leaders know it, and even HRH Queen Elizabeth II is packing her handbags and corgis, but for the rest of us it’s f...