The one thing Step Brothers does not want for is a good solid high concept: 39-year-old Brennan Huff (Will Ferrell) and 40-year-old Dale Doback (John C. Reilly), two men with crippling cases of arrested development, are forced to live together when their parents marry; the two man-children have to do a whole lot of growing […]

It may still be the depths of summer, but the (very British) adaptation of a (very British) classic novel set in the costume- and set-designer friendly 1930s positively shrieks “Oscarbait!” from the highest rafters, and by all means, the new version of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited is a perfect exemplar of the form: it’s been […]

Sometimes a movie just comes right along and punches a hole in your gut, and for me, Vampyr was just such a movie. Like any halfway decent connoisseur of paranormal horror and inordinately artsy European films, I’ve known about Carl Theodor Dreyer’s first sound film for ages, but somehow I’d managed to go without seeing […]

Now here’s something surprising: after Halloween II, producer John Carpenter wanted to take his franchise away from the implacable killer Michael Myers (who was, at any rate, dead), and try something with little precedent in cinema history. Going forward, every new Halloween film would be a stand-alone horror story set on October 31, and so […]

My inner X-Phile is still strong enough and impassioned enough, all these years after the series ended in a crush of sub-mediocre episodes that it seems only fair to give him the preamble: The Fanboy’s Tale “Chris Carter certainly deserves praise for giving the second X-Files movie an especially canny subtitle: I want to believe, […]

Oh, how it is tempting to make a dreadful pun like “The Wackness is totally wack”, but just because a filmmaker invites mean jokes with a poorly thought-out title, doesn’t mean the reviewer is obligated to take advantage. Still, it is totally wack. At least, it’s marred by an inconsistent tone and a plot that […]

Mamma Mia! is the movie version of Red Bull. It is absolutely going to raise your energy level, but it’s practically guaranteed to give you the jitters, it’s artificially sweet, and it leaves a foul chemical aftertaste. Based on the ginormous Broadway hit, Mamma Mia! begins on a supremely photogenic Greek island with Sophie (Amanda […]

In the misty depths of cinema history, when the very idea of a “multi-reel”, “feature-length” movie was still in its infancy, we come across a bizarre chimera: neither fish nor fowl, neither feature nor short. I refer to the serial, a form born and popularised in the early 1910s, and still alive and kicking in […]

For this summer’s slasher festivities, I selected the Halloween and Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchises for the most pragmatic of reasons: I’d already done Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street, and I simply picked the next two biggest names in the subgenre. But as I reach Halloween II, I’m stunned by how many […]

There are many types of people in the world, but the two I’m concerned about right now are these: those who hear about a new Werner Herzog film and immediately clear space at the top of the year-end Best Of lists, and those who, unaccountably, do not. I’m shamelessly one of the former; yet even […]

Let us begin by shooting the giant elephant in the room: yes, Heath Ledger is actually that good, and people would still be saying he was that good even if he were alive. His work as the Joker is just about the finest imaginable, and one of the most intense, most dangerous performances of a […]

In the current comic-book movie flood that began in 2000, it’s always seemed to me that 2005 ought to be regarded as the highest water-mark, producing three of the smartest, most stylistically compelling and absolutely the darkest films of the genre: in April of that year, we were treated to Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller’s […]