COMEDY– tag –

(Neo, Uncooked Media) Love, Chunibyo & Other Delusions is an excellent teen comedy-drama – a label that fits a show that’s broad comedy for the first half and urgent drama for the second. It’s by the studio (Kyoto Animation) and director...

(Neo, Uncooked Media) 2196: the Earth is under attack from the mysterious “Jovian Lizards”. A new ship is launched against the enemy, the Nadesico, with the most eccentric crew imaginable. But they’ll learn that everything they think abo...

My review of the original 26-part Durarara! series is available on the Neo magazine website, along with my review of the first sequel series, Durarara!! x2 Shou. My Neo review of the second sequel series, Durarara!! x2 Sho, is below. Fol...

(Neo, Uncooked Media - I also made further observations in an article on the film on the AllTheAnime website) Have you seen the series The Tatami Galaxy? If you have, then this film is Tatami Galaxy: The Movie, from the same maverick dir...

(Neo, Uncooked Media) You may have heard of Shimoneta’s reputation as a smutfest, and we’re here to tell you that… the reputation is deserved. The title means “dirty joke” and the show tries furiously to find enough jokes about sex, sex ...

(Judge Dredd Megazine, Rebellion) Back in 2004, I spent a strange day at Ealing Studios in west London, watching Simon Pegg and Nick Frost playing whack-a-zombie with snooker cues. If you’ve seen the zombie comedy film Shaun of the Dead,...

My review of the Netflix series Love, Death and Robots is on the AlltheAnime website (although the series itself isn't an anime).

(SFX Magazine, Future Publishing - there are also further reflections on the series in an article I wrote for the MangaUK blog.) Oh, you’re awake. Lie there on the ground for a moment, and listen to me. Welcome to the Afterlife Battlefro...

(Sight and Sound Magazine, BFI) The recent Toy Story 3 featured an opening fantasy sequence in which various oddly assorted toys starred in a madcap adventure that began as a Western train heist and ended with forcefields and porcine spa...

(Judge Dredd Megazine, Rebellion) Rated 18. Contains images of strong bloody violence, torture, scalping, strangulation, castration (no balls at all!), farce, cartoon German and British soldiers, cartoon war leaders, a cartoon Brad Pitt,...

(Judge Dredd Megazine, Rebellion) I saw Ruben Fleischer's comic Zombieland expecting little and enjoyed immensely. True, there's a big problem with the concept; it's a zombie pic where the two key characters are a college-age maybe-coupl...

(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...

(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 ...

(Neo, Uncooked Media) This is the Tenchi that British fans are likeliest to have seen already, the 13-part video series from the early 1990s that looks better than most TV fare today. It began a sprawling franchise but remains highly acc...

(Sight & Sound, BFI) Shrek Forever After is the fourth, and apparently final, computer-animated film to feature the grumpy green ogre who’s been the unofficial mascot of the Dreamworks studio since the first Shrek nine years ago. The ori...

(I interviewed Lilo and Stitch's directors, Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois, for the Animation World Network website; I also interviewed Lilo's animator Andreas Deja. Additionally, I wrote a piece on the Japanese TV version of Lilo and St...

(Sight & Sound, BFI) The Story of Ferdinand was a picture book published in America in 1936, with a story by Munro Leaf and illustrations by Robert Lawson. Amusing and pleasing, it’s the story of a gentle bull, Ferdinand, who loves f...

(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...

(Sight & Sound Magazine, BFI) New England, the present. In the town of Blithe Fell, eleven year-old Norman sees ghosts wherever he goes, while his family and schoolmates think he’s deranged. Norman is pestered by his eccentric uncle ...

(SFX Magazine, Future Publishing) A century ago, some of the first stop-motion cartoons were goofy caveman comedies by Willis O'Brien, who later animated King Kong. Now Britain's favourite stop-motion colossus, Nick Park, offers a plasti...

(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...

(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) 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...