'Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven!'
~ Wordsworth
That's quite an apt quote for My Generation, a documentary film fronted by Michael Caine which explores the breakthrough of young British working class talent in the 1960s. At the start of the film, Caine relates how his parents would often look to their own past and describe it as 'the good old days'. Caine, he admits, saw nothing good about a…
Another film I haven't seen in a long time, not since childhood in fact, when it was on heavy rotation thanks to regular matinee screenings on TV. Based on Blackpool summer season's hit 1953 stage comedy of the same name, The Love Match stars Arthur Askey and was written by Glenn Melvyn, his lanky co-star and stooge whose comedic stammer would (along with much of its north country wit) go on to inspire writer Roy Clarke and comedian Ronnie Barker…
After a string of strong one-off dramas for Channel 4, Ben Chanan moves to BBC1 and turns his attention to long-form drama, all without missing a beat. Everything that was great about Blackout, Cyberbully and The People Next Door, is present and correct across six gripping hour long episodes. Like Black Mirror, Chanan's metier is to explore the concerns we have, or indeed should have, with modern technology, and argues for proper checks and balances. But unlike Black Mirror, the…
I turned 40 today, so I decided to watch a film I always feel fondly towards yet hadn't seen in a while. Am I the only person who views Gorky Park as a birthday treat? Probably!
Long term followers will know I'm not a big fan of remakes. But if the makers of Chernobyl wished to remake this and adapt the other Renko novels by Martin Cruz Smith then you won't hear me complaining.
Incidentally, Martin Cruz Smith made his…
Still can't get over Noel blocking the Oasis tracks. The One Love Manchester sequence deserved to be played unedited. That day was obviously about far more than who wrote what, who's band it was or any brotherly spat. We all own those songs, that's what happens with music and that moment needn't to be properly represented here. What a dick.
Previous review here.
Surprisingly I haven't reviewed this before!
When Zombieland arrived in 2009 (ten years ago already?) it was an immediate zeitgeist movie - just not one that launched the zeitgeist. That honour of course befell Shaun of the Dead five years earlier and saw America play catch up in spoofing a genre it had pretty much created.
Zombieland is short, sweet, deeply meta and funny. But it's also pretty pointless and that's OK. Sometimes you just want to see Woody Harrelson…
"What do you expect from someone who uses their fanny as a burglar's jemmy?"
Let me take you back to November 1990 when I was just eleven years old and I had begun to have trouble sleeping on a Sunday night. A naturally anxious child, I think I had began to worry about school; specifically the fact that I would be leaving junior school the following year and moving on up to secondary school. But I also think a good…
It ought to come as no surprise that, of all his '90s anti-establishment comic contemporaries, Chris Morris has lost none of his bite or his caustic eye for what the powers that be claim to be doing in our name. Unlike his former collaborators who have become the twitterati, firing missives that may criticise the government but ultimately respect the neocon status quo and wish for it to persist, he is still deeply anti-establishment.
Morris knows that the best way…
This deeply obscure (in all meaning of the word) euro thriller from 1984 stars Will Patton as Marsh, an American abroad - West Berlin actually - caught up in a deadly game of murder and intrigue when his associate is killed and a diplomat's daughter suffers a fatal overdose in his room. His fate sealed, Marsh's only hope is a peculiar deal made by Robbie Coltrane's enigmatic Customs agent to deliver a metal Chinese box which he arranges to be…
A deeply absorbing, heartfelt and strikingly beautiful film, Loving Vincent tells the story of the death of Van Gogh through the eyes of Armand Roulin, who has come into possession of the final letter the artist had written. Determined to see that the letter gets to the widow of Van Gogh's brother, Theo, Armand heads to Paris and begins to piece together those final days.
Based on the controversial theory extrapolated by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith in their…
It's impossible to deny that Joker is anything other than a divisive movie. I've read the five and four star reviews and I've read the one star reviews. I could see merit in all of them. I had my own preconceptions of the movie, after all.
I worried that the film was doing the usual harmful Hollywood stereotype of depicting someone with mental health problems as being a danger to others, when in reality, such people are more likely to…
"...It’s a lonely place for someone like me over on Letterboxd just now. Whilst the bulk of the community celebrate the Halloween season with the Hooptober Horror Film Challenge I, never much of a joiner-inner, continue to watch whatever takes my fancy. It’s not that I don’t appreciate a good scary movie, I just couldn’t think of anything worse than watching nothing but them for four weeks. However, m’colleagues here at The Geek Show have offered me a concessionary branch-line in the shape of this review for Alan Parker’s 1987 film, Angel Heart..."
See my full review at The Geek Show