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THE X-FILES (1998) • THE X-FILES: I WANT TO BELIEVE (2008)
He’s the obsessed FBI agent who desperately wants to believe. She’s the cynical FBI agent who wears a cross around her neck and can never escape the lure of the paranormal. 1990s TV icons Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) are back this Sunday for a six-part ‘event series’ in the U.S,…
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THE VISIT (2015)
A found footage thriller directed by M. Night Shyamalan may not be the most appealing prospect given the director’s recent filmography. While movies like The Happening and After Earth certainly have their share of interesting moments, as a whole they’re surprisingly disjointed and tonally incoherent given how their director’s strongest suits, in his earlier films, were his…
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ROOM (2015)
Fans of Emma Donoghue’s achingly beautiful novel Room can breathe a sigh of relief; the critical buzz, four Oscar nominations (including Best Picture, Best Lead Actress, and Best Director) and all the other awards already won by this adaptation of her best-selling book are more than deserved. Behind the accomplishment is filmmaker Lenny Abrahamson, who…
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THE REVENANT (2015)
Revenge is one of cinema’s most enduring themes, and with good reason. There’s something enormously satisfying about not only the payoff to a good vengeance story, but the journey a character goes through as they walk a path of retribution. In Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant, that revenge tale is intertwined with a story of survival on the frontier…
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Cracked Actor: Bowie on Screen
I don’t think we’ll ever see someone like David Bowie again, who died last Sunday at the age of 69. He was a transformer, a cultural icon, and a creative artist working in a media-saturated era where such laudable qualities have gradually been devalued in favour of faux celebrity and stardom. A startling career in…
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AMERICAN HORROR STORY: HOTEL – ‘Be Our Guest’
While the penultimate episode of American Horror Story: Hotel wrapped up a few of the show’s plotlines, there were still enough loose ends—Sally’s (Sarah Paulson) murderous scorn towards John (Wes Bentley), the detective’s tentative reunion with his family, the question of what would happen to the Countess’s (Lady Gaga) vampire baby—to set the stage for…
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The 88th Academy Awards – 2016 Nominees
I stopped caring about the Oscars five years ago, once I admitted to myself they don’t mean a great deal and rarely reflect the absolute best of what’s been released. There are too many examples of great actors, actresses, directors and screenwriters who never got any Oscar love—from Stanley Kubrick to the recently-departed Alan Rickman,…
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CREED (2015)
Predictability tends to be seen as damaging to a film; but it’s not a hard-and-fast rule. Familiarity deserves to have its praises sung, because when the template for your film is what’s widely regarded as the greatest underdog story ever told, why change too much? In Creed, we have a film that continues the Rocky franchise by spending…
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THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE – Season One
It is 1962. Germany and Japan have won the Second World War and since 1947 the occupied United States is divided between the two super powers. Imperial Japan controls the West Coast (renamed the Japanese Pacific States), while the Nazis have annexed the East as part of the Greater German Reich. The Rocky Mountains operate…
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JEKYLL & HYDE – Series One
Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde is one of the immovable cornerstones of horror literature. Having been adapted and parodied so many times over the decades, it’s developed a life far beyond even the wildest reaches of Stevenson’s imagination. Along with Dracula, the Wolf Man, and Frankenstein’s…
