I’ll stand by the opening half hour of The Force Awakens. It’s brilliant, propulsive cinema that does a great job of introducing a new and incredibly charismatic cast of characters. But even at it’s best there’s warning signals flickering in the distance. The dialogue is a touch too cute. The film seems terrified of slowing down, even for a second. Even Rey’s introduction, where we find her grimly scavenging though Star Wars iconography of films past, is a apt metaphor…
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Heretic 2024
Excellent, tense, three hander with slick direction and maybe a career best performance from Grant. The first half is genuinely fantastic: a slow, talky escalation that only works as well as it does due to some clever writing and some fantastic acting. Grant's great but the other two also nail it: Sophie Thatcher, in particular, is a star in the making.
The second half can't quite match the first. The film continues to intrigue and surprise but the answers, when…
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Count Dracula 1970
Jess Franco’s Count Dracula opens with a title card pitching itself as the most accurate version of the story yet. I don’t know about that, but it’s certainly the sleepiest version of Stoker I’ve seen. Lacking both the high gothic melodrama of the best scenes of the Universal film and the lush cinematography of Hammer, this is pretty dreary. It feels like a cheap 70s teleplay more than anything: they had access to some beautiful interior locations but lacked the…
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The Visitor 1979
A coked-up looking Franco Nero playing space Jesus lays out the story for the The Visitor at the start of the film, but it's so utterly incomprehensible that I was worried that there might be a test later. Something to do with birds, aliens and cosmic powers at war with each other. The upshot is that John Huston is God (maybe?) and is sent to Atlanta to deal with the latest incarnation of an intergalactic evil: an 8 year old…
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