“The greatest show time” | Perfect Blue (1997) and Paprika (2006)
‘It’s the greatest show time!’ announces a clown as he impossibly squeezes out of a tiny automobile. A circus ring seems like an incongruous place ...
REVIEW: Hellraiser: Bloodline (1996)
In 1796 Paris the toy maker Philip Le Marchard (Bruce Ramsay) is hired to construct an elaborate puzzle box of gold and wood. In 1996 New York his descendant John Merchant, haunted by mysterious dreams, has designed an entire skyscraper based on the puzzle box's design. In 2127, the scientist Dr Paul Merchant works against ...
REVIEW: Léon: The Professional (1994)
Léon (Jean Reno) is a professional killer who works for New York's mafia. When a corrupt DEA agent named Stansfield (Gary Oldman) murders almost the entire family in the apartment next door, Léon finds himself the unwilling guardian of the sole surviving daughter Mathilda (Natalie Portman). Given his somewhat flabby, effects-oriented films of recent years - ...
REVIEW: A Quiet Place (2018)
In the aftermath of a global cataclysm, the world is overrun with lethal carnivorous monsters. They are blind, but their hearing is so keen that the slightest sound can alert them to their victim's presence. One family - a father (John Krasinski), mother (Emily Blunt), son (Noah Jupe), and daughter (Millicent Simmonds) - do their ...
REVIEW: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (2018)
1946. Writer Juliet Ashton (Lily James) receives a letter from Dawsey Adams (Michiel Huisman), a pig farmer on the island of Guernsey - which was occupied by the Germans during the war. Their exchange begins with a request for a book, and ends with Juliet travelling to Guernsey to meet Dawsey's local book club: the ...
REVIEW: The Milkwoman (2005)
Early each morning 50 year-old Minako (Yuko Tanaka) climbs the hundreds of steps in a hill-side Nagasaki suburb to deliver bottles of milk to the local residents. She lives alone. She has no children. She has never married. She had one love in high school, Keita (Ittoku Kishibe), but he now works in the city ...
REVIEW: Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (1992)
Aspiring television news reporter Joey Summerskill (Terry Farrell) seems to have hit on the story of a lifetime when she sees a man brought into the emergency room close to death, and embedded with hooked chains over his entire body. Instead she is dragged into a crisis in hell as the Cenobite leader Pinhead (Doug ...
REVIEW: Rampage (2018)
Primotologist Davis Okoye (Dwayne Johnson) tends to a group of gorillas in a San Diego nature reserve. When a corporate space station is destroyed in orbit, canisters of genetically modifying gas crash-land across the continental United States. One of the canisters crashes into the San Diego reserve, transforming an albino silverback gorilla nick-named George into ...
REVIEW: The Hunt for Red October (1990)
In 1984 the Soviet Union launches its experimental first-strike nuclear submarine, the Red October. Its captain Marko Ramius (Sean Connery), fearing its purpose and tiring of his government, conspires with his officers to steal the Red October and defect to the USA. On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, CIA analyst Jack Ryan (Alec ...
REVIEW: Lady in the Water (2006)
Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti) works as the superintendent of a Philadelphia apartment block. One night he discovers a mysterious young woman in the block's swimming pool. Named Story (Bryce Dallas Howard), she turns out to be a water nymph known as a Narf, come to inspire a writer living in the block who will eventually ...
REVIEW: Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988)
In the aftermath of her family's destruction, Kirsty Cotton (Ashley Laurence) wakes up in a psychiatric hospital. The ambivalent Dr Channard (Kenneth Cranham) claims he wants to help Kirsty, but it soon becomes clear he has his eye on unlocking the demonic puzzle box and exploring the mysteries of hell for himself. Soon Kirsty's dead ...
