A commercial spaceship is on its way back to Earth when its journey is interrupted by an unknown signal emanating from a nearby planet. The crew is revived from hyper-sleep to investigate. On the planet LV-426 they discover a mysterious … Continue reading REVIEW: Alien (1979)
Popular cinema is littered with underrated films. The creators of the 2011 fantasy Immortals probably cannot complain. Their Greek myth-inspired epic was a commercial success at least, although it only grossed a little more than half that of Clash of the … Continue reading REVIEW: Immortals (2011)
Iain Softley’s 2005 thriller The Skeleton Key has a queasily uncertain relationship with race, and I honestly cannot decide if it has stumbled into being unexpectedly clever about it or if it is simply so fearful of setting a foot out of … Continue reading REVIEW: The Skeleton Key (2005)
Robert Roy MacGregor was born in 1671 near Loch Katrine in Scotland’s Perthshire. As a young man, like many Scottish patriots, he was drawn to the 1689 Jacobite uprising – an armed rebellion to restore Stuart dynasty rule to the … Continue reading “Neither asked nor given” | Rob Roy (1995)
I have always been fascinated by Disney’s ‘dark’ period, which commenced with The Black Hole in 1979 and wound up with the catastrophic failure of The Black Cauldron in 1985. Disney has always leavened its family films with elements of … Continue reading REVIEW: Night Crossing (1982)
In 1884 London the physician Frederick Treves (Anthony Hopkins) meets John Merrick (John Hurt), a severely deformed and apparently non-verbal young man living in a carnival show. Taking Merrick in to the hospital where we works, Treves starts on what … Continue reading REVIEW: The Elephant Man (1980)
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