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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…
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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,…
