One Saturday, five kids from different social cliques are all brought in for a day’s detention. Over the course of the day, they’ll find that their generic labels – the athlete (Emilio Estevez), the princess (Molly Ringwald), the brain (Anthony Michael Hall), the criminal (Judd Nelson) and the basket case (Ally Sheedy) – may not reveal every detail about their respective personalities.
Continue reading
In New York, a horrid freeloader by the name of Holly Golightly flitters through life utterly oblivious to how vile and despicable she is, mooching off everyone, never doing anything to benefit society and aiding criminals along the way. She receives a new upstairs neighbour, Paul Varjak (George Peppard), whom she insists on calling Fred because that’s how frustrating a creature she is. Paul is a semi-failed penniless writer working as a sort-of escort on the side. He is bemused by Holly’s lifestyle and inexplicably falls for her, despite her gold-digging tendencies and his own significant lack of funds.
Continue reading
Kind Louis XIV of France (Alan Rickman) has commissioned a new garden for the palace of Versailles, and instructed his landscaper Andre (Matthias Schoenaerts) to the task. He interviews many different garden designer for the garden’s various segments, finally settling upon the alternatively-minded Sabine (Kate Winslet) for the role, much to the chagrin of the men who will be working under and alongside her.
Continue reading
John Ruth “The Hangman” (Kurt Russell) is a bounty hunter known for bringing in his bounties alive, regardless of the difficulty in doing so. His latest conquest is Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), but whilst transporting her by stagecoach through a brutal winter storm, he is forced to stop off at Minnie’s Haberdashery to wait out the blizzard. On his way there he picks up a fellow bounty hunter, Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson) and the new sheriff of the town they’re heading for, Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins). Upon arriving at the haberdashery, Ruth and the others find Minnie nowhere to be found, and four strangers (Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Demian Bichir and Bruce Dern) holding the fort instead.
Continue reading
Best friend singing-dancing double act Dorothy Shaw (Jane Russell) and Lorelei Lee (Marilyn Monroe) have very different approaches to love. Dorothy is looking for a penniless hunk for a night of passion, whilst Lorelei is content settling down with her bookish but extremely wealthy fiancé Gus Edmond (Tommy Noonan). When Gus’ father imposes upon the upcoming wedding, Lorelei and Dorothy jump aboard a cruise ship to Paris, with the intention that Gus will join them at a later date and they will have the wedding in France. However, once aboard the ship the wealth-obsessed gold-digging Lorelei soon finds her attention drawn to Sir Francis “Piggy” Beekman, the owner of a diamond mine.
Continue reading
This review was originally written for Blueprint: Review.
In a prison in Brazil, two cellmates – cross-dressing homosexual Luis Molina (William Hurt) and aggressive political prisoner Valentin Arregui (Raul Julia) – form an unlikely friendship as Luis recounts one of his favourite films to pass the time.
Continue reading
I’m not going to waste any more time on this than I have to. Heaven and Earth Magic is, to quote John Cleese, a senseless waste of human life. It’s 66 minutes of crude, jerky, 1950s stop motion that pieces together to form not one single iota of sense. It’s the kind of film where trying to decode the nonsense and assemble some kind of coherent narrative would drive you utterly insane, because it’s nothing but objects and outlines, interacting with one another in increasingly bizarre ways. Any such plot that could be assigned to the goings-on would do so via great leaps of metaphor, and many threadbare external references applied.
Continue reading
Doug (Justin Bartha) is getting married in two days, so his buddies Phil (Bradley Cooper) and Stu (Ed Helms) take him to Las Vegas for his bachelor party, with Doug’s soon-to-be brother-in-law Alan (Zach Galifianakis) tagging along too. They have a wild time on Friday night, but come Saturday morning Phil, Stu and Alan wake up to a trashed hotel suite, a baby in a closet, a tiger in the bathroom and Doug nowhere to be seen. They’ve got just 24 hours to sort everything out and get Doug back in time for his own wedding.
Continue reading
You may have noticed I haven’t posted my 2015 in Review or Most Anticipated for 2016 posts. This is correct, well done on being so observant. I’ve got both saved in draft and am about halfway through the 2015 in Review (I’ve hit a stumbling block in that I can’t remember anything that happened in American Sniper so lost my momentum) so that’ll come out eventually. What probably won’t is my Anticipated list for 2016. The reason being is that there’s not all that many incoming films I’m terribly excited about.
We did a recent Lambcast episode on this very subject, and I found myself at a loss. There’s one film I’m really, really looking forward to in 2016, and that’s Shane Black’s The Nice Guys. Other than that I’d honestly be fine if everything else coming out this year just… sort of… didn’t. Granted there’s films I’ll see because they look fun – Captain America: Civil War, Deadpool, Finding Dory – and others I’ll be obliged to for podcasting reasons – Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice springs unfortunately to mind – and of course there’s the batch of late 2015 films that are only just getting released in the UK – The Revenant, The Big Short, Spotlight, Room – which I’m sure will be more than worth a watch, as long as I get to them before the Oscars. It’s just that nothing is getting me excited. It’s probably a comparison to last year, when I was all stoked for the new Star Wars, Avengers, Spectre, Jurassic World and, most regrettably, The Good Dinosaur. After a few disappointments in 2015, maybe I’ve lowered my expectations for 2016 so low that I’d honestly be OK if the cinemas all took a break for a year. Heck, it’d give me a chance to save some cash and make some more headway watching the films I need to see. Speaking of which, here’s what I watched this week:
Continue reading
A disfigured English-speaking man (Ralph Fiennes) is being cared for by a nurse (Juliette Binoche) in Italy during World War 2. Whilst being moved his condition worsens, so she cares for him in the ruins of a monastery where they are joined by some bomb disposal technicians (Naveen Andrews and Kevin Whately) and a thumb-less Canadian (Willem Dafoe). All the while the man struggles to remember who he is, recalling his past sharing an affair with a British woman (Kristen Scott Thomas) married to one of the man’s colleagues (Colin Firth).
Continue reading
Life Vs Film 