Where the Crawdads Sing ★★½  PERHAPS I should have done a little more homework in preparation for watching Where the Crawdads Sing. I knew it was based on a best-selling novel, was set in the backwaters of North Carolina in the 1960s and involved a murder trial. That was enough […]

Crawdads’ song a little of-key

The Black Phone  ★★★ ETHAN Hawke reunites with director Scott Derrickson for the entertaining horror film The Black Phone. They last collaborated when Hawke played the lead role in 2012’s Sinister. This time Hawke has a smaller but pivotal role as ‘The Grabber’, a masked kidnapper of young boys terrorising […]

Hawke answers the call

Thor: Love and Thunder ★★½ MARVEL has really dropped the ball with its film treatment of one of its original superheroes. In Thor: Love and Thunder, the Norse God has become a bumbling, lovelorn fool to the extent that it’s hard to see where he is going to re-fit into […]

Thor lost in comic universe

God Told Me To ★★★½ ISN’T it great when you come across a film you have never heard of that’s actually pretty good? God Told Me To is a sci-fi horror film that has completely slipped under my radar for four decades. It was released in 1976, the same year […]

Sci-fi horror oddity discovered

The Phantom of the Open ★★★½ EARLIER in 2022 we saw the release of English comedy The Duke with Jim Broadbent playing a real character from history. In that enjoyable film the person ‘ borrowed’ a famous painting from an art gallery to make an anti-establishment statement and ended up […]

True-life story scores a birdie

The Burning Sea  ★★★½ NORWEGIAN writers Harold Rosenlow-Eeg and Lars Gudmestad are already responsible for the on-screen destruction of parts of their country, via tsunami in The Wave (2015), earthquake in The Quake (2018) and Russian military invasion in three television seasons of Occupied. Now they have turned their attention […]

Burning Sea a salutory thriller

The Retreat  ★★ LET’S see how many horror cliches we can tick off in The Retreat from 2021, not the 2020 one. Prologue death in the woods by an unseen assailant…1. Overhead tracking shot of car driving along highway with woodlands either side…2 Friends stop at a petrol station with […]

Ticking off the cliches

Men  ★★★★ ALEX Garland’s Men is one of the most fascinating films to come out of the Covid years. It’s been extremely difficult to make films at all, let alone great ones. This nightmarish, metaphor depiction of male power and domination makes extraordinarily good use of a single, sparsely populated […]

The horror in Men

Anaconda ★★★½ DOES Anaconda have the best ‘wink’ ever committed to celluloid? If you’ve seen the 1997 American adventure/horror film you will know exactly what I’m referring to. If you haven’t then I’m not going to spoil it. ‘The wink’ is just one of many ridiculously fun moments in a […]

Give Anaconda a hug

No One Gets Out Alive ★★★ ENGLISH horror film No One Gets Out Alive (2021) has an intriguing premise but ultimately doesn’t explore it enough. It starts with a prologue featuring home video footage of what looks like an archaeological team uncovering a container from deep within an ancient Mexican […]

Things that go bump

Spiderhead ★★½ CHRIS Hemsworth’s association with Netflix hasn’t amounted to anything special so far. Extraction was a well-made, sometimes exciting actioner, but Interceptor, which he co-produced, was a dud. The latest offering, sci-fi thriller Spiderhead also fails to reach any heights, despite being based on a popular dystopian short story […]

Spiderhead loses legless

Elvis  ★★★★ IT MAY not be the definitive story of The King’s life, but Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis stunningly captures the spirit of the man and his cultural impact. In particular the Australian director does a fantastic job of documenting the key influences and moments in history that in turn influenced […]

Elvis captures The King’s spirit