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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…
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JOY (2015)
If there were a recipe that could be applied to David O. Russell’s output of the last few years, it would go something like this: take a group of loosely connected characters, each with their own hang-ups, histories and quirks, and spearhead the group with one or two characters that are both quirkier and more…
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AMERICAN HORROR STORY: HOTEL – ‘Battle Royale’
I don’t have nearly as many observations as questions about “Battle Royale,” the penultimate episode of American Horror Story: Hotel. The series typically ties up whatever plot strands its showrunners deem worthy of tying up in the penultimate hour, leaving the finale as a denouement, which was quite effective in its first two years. While subsequent seasons…
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THE HATEFUL EIGHT (2015)
While The Hateful Eight has proven to be a divisive movie, even many of its critics have praised Quentin Tarantino for working to keep film alive with the movie’s 70mm release (the widest of its kind, in the U.S, since 1992’s Far and Away). Seen in a proper movie palace, complete with overture and intermission,…
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PARTISAN (2015)
Whether it’s the intense psychological drama of films like Sean Durkin’s underrated chiller Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011), or the hilarious satire of irresistible Netflix comedy Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, cultish secluded communities under the spell of charismatic, despotic, and most likely polygamist patriarchs, have become a popular setting for exploring the human condition. Australian filmmaker…
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Interview: James Dormer, co-creator of ITV’s BEOWULF
James Dormer is a British screenwriter, who has worked on TV shows like Sky1’s Sinbad, the BBC’s Musketeers and Spooks, ITV’s The Fixer, and as co-executive producer on the Cinemax/Sky action thriller Strike Back. He also wrote the 2014 Nicholas Cage movie Outcast. Now, he’s the head writer and executive producer behind ITV’s new fantasy…
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The 10 Greatest Studio Ghibli Films
It’s no overstatement to say that there’s always something to be impressed by in every Studio Ghibli film. Whether it’s the superb artistry of the animation, the delicacy and meaning of the storytelling, or the tremendous power of the ideas within the story, there’s something ineffable about these works that makes them so captivating. Japan’s…
