Directors: Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck Stars: Brie Larson, Samuel L Jackson, Clark Gregg That the Marvel machine has taken 11 years and 20-ish films to get to a female-centric superhero movie is such a glaring and conspicuous oversight that Captain Marvel arrives with a hideously unenviable burden. It has to mean something. It has to be … Continue reading Review: Captain Marvel
Director: M Night Shyamalan Stars: Samuel L Jackson, Bruce Willis, James McAvoy Extreme reactions are often not constructive and point toward a preconceived bias or clouded objectivity. My writing is sometimes deliberately subjective, and I find the line between the two porous. Still, though sceptical of M Night Shyamalan's ability to work himself out of … Continue reading Review: Glass
Director: Ryan Coogler Stars: Chadwick Boseman, Lupita Nyong'o, Danai Gurira Black Panther is against binaries. It's against simplistic divisions such as seeing the world as East and West; Northern and Southern hemispheres; first world and third. It's against selective thinking that reduces arguments to black and white; selective thinking that can slice a crisis along … Continue reading Review: Black Panther
Director: James Mangold Stars: Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Dafne Keen Did we realise, two years ago, that we were living in an age of superhero stagnation? Yes, probably, very much so. The glut of spandex movies has been pressing for a number of years. I can even remember talking about exhaustion on the subject way … Continue reading Review: Logan
Director: Chris McKay Stars: Will Arnett, Michael Cera, Rosario Dawson First thing's first and BAM! we're dropped into a LEGO short, which I can't tell you the name of because even this is spoilery. The appearance of this 5 minutes of fun is significant though. It immediately places Warner Bros Animation Group and specifically their burgeoning LEGO … Continue reading Review: The LEGO Batman Movie
There's a moment in one of the early 'Treehouse Of Horror' episodes of The Simpsons that sprang to mind while I was watching Thor: The Dark World. The Simpson family inherit an old spooky house with a host of haunted goings-on occurring within. In one room is a vortex into which Homer chucks an orange. Immediately after, … Continue reading Review: Thor: The Dark World
Red was fun. Something of a sleeper hit, it managed to travel by word-of-mouth, offering light-hearted action backed with a spitfire script and some very appealing characters. Evidently it did enough business to make a sequel commercially viable, which ought to be good news for everyone. With so many comic book adaptations gunning to be … Continue reading Review: Red 2
***originally written 23 May 2012*** This movie was not designed for me. I’ve never seen Iron Man or Iron Man 2. I’ve never seen any iteration of the Incredible Hulk. I’ve not seen Thor or Captain America. In fact, when it comes to HUGE-budget summer blockbusting comic book films, I pretty much label them “not … Continue reading Review: Marvel’s Avengers Assemble
