Deconstructing the machinery of cinema.
With the Walt Disney company launching its own international film and television streaming service Disney+ within two months, one of the big questions was with what sorts of productions would the service launch. New and exclusive series like Star Wars spin-off The Mandalorian have been well publicised, but the question is more about back catalogue materials - what, ...
Death row prisoner Callum Lynch (Michael Fassbender) is kidnapped after a faked execution and wakes up in a secret facility in Madrid. There he is plugged into "the Animus" - a cutting edge technology that allows people to experience the lives of their ancestors - and forced to help an ancient conspiracy of Templars in ...
Did you ever see Are You Being Served?, a 1977 feature film adapted from the television comedy - in which the staff of the Grace Bros department store collectively go on holiday to the Spanish resort of "Costa Plonka", only for humorous shenanigans to ensue? Or perhaps Holiday on the Buses, a 1973 feature film adapted from ...
Alice Guy-Blaché, the French filmmaker widely credited as the world's first female director, falls under the spotlight in Pamela B. Green's widely celebrated new documentary. She is a creditable choice for a documentary subject: not just historically significant but immensely talented, and entertaining to learn about. She started off a secretary to film company founder ...
The life of New York high schooler Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) is thrown into disarray when he is stung by a radioactive spider and whipped up into an inter-dimensional conflict involving not one but six alternative iterations of Spider-Man. Together they must defeat the city's famed criminal boss Wilson Fisk before he opens a portal ...
Jonas Nightengale (Steve Martin) and his road train carry a combination of preaching and faith healing from one small American town to the next. It is all a fraudulent simulation, of course, with Nightengale's charismatic preaching driving credulous locals to donate him thousands of dollars a night in the name of the Lord. When his ...
If there is a topic that seems to dominate among film geeks this year, it is Walt Disney's growing program of live-action adaptations based on their animated back catalogue. It was only back in late May that I wrote: 'It is a program of films powered by crass commercialism and audience nostalgia, and most of ...
