Films

As music biopics go, there are very few that truly live up to the hype. 2005's 'Walk The Line' is probably the best and most compelling of the bunch. The reason, you could argue, is because of the nature of Johnny Cash's life and the depth of his music. Although, in most cases, this doesn't really help because many of these efforts are documenting people with equally interesting upbringings and falling far short. Is it because a fictional re-telling never lives up to real lif

M. Night Shyamalan's career has been an interesting one. The impact of his first few films was so incredibly strong that the mere mention of his name generates enough interest to get bums on seats. This is despite the fact that there have been some serious ups and downs in his canon over the years. For every 'The Sixth Sense' (1999) there is a 'The Last Airbender' (2010). Yet still, even here in 2025, we tune in. Why? Well, for better or worse, M. Night is an auteur who is ve

"So I was sitting in my cubicle today and I realized, ever since I started working, every single day of my life has been worse than the day before it. So that means that every single day that you see me, that's on the worst day of my life." Before Ricky Gervais & Stephen Merchant's 'The Office' there was 'Office Space', one of the first films to satirize the mundane realities of life in an average workplace. At the time of it's creation, Mike Judge was riding high off the ba

It seems that someone like Kevin Costner has, by this point, became a name so ubiquitous with movie stardom that you really don't ever feel the need to trace his career journey. He's one of those people you get the impression came out of the womb fully formed as Kevin Costner and someone happened to start filming him at some point in his mesmerisingly handsome life. However, like everyone else on planet earth, Kev also had to toil his way up the proverbial ladder until reachi

When you really take a moment to think it through, the movie career of Arnold Schwarzenegger is amazing. From a small mining town in the mountains of deepest Austria, he rose to become the biggest movie star in the world. This being despite the fact that he can't really act, if we're being honest. Indeed such is the power and charisma of the man that his, shall we say, limited range became it's own sub-genre in the 1980s, and an extremely successful one at that. You didn't tu

Politics has always been a tricky subject to represent in a meaningful way. The problem is, by and large, that the subjects involved are almost beyond portrayal a lot of the time, such is the vacuous, used car salesman veneer of most politicians on the entire planet. How do you tell stories about non-people pretending to be people? The best efforts are often satirical (2009's 'In The Loop' being a fine example) or overly-glossy and not realistic (any episode of 'The West Wing

In 1988, not that much was widely known about the escalating gang situation in Los Angeles. This was the time of the Showtime Lakers, Planet Hollywood, and Box Office Hits. No one wanted to hear that there was a war going on south of the 10 freeway that had, at that point, claimed thousands of lives. Perhaps it was because the victims in this war were almost exclusively young black and latino males. That is a wider topic that, fortunately,  as we sit in 2025, there have been

This isn't a popular opinion but here it is anyway. I'm not a huge fan of Brian De Palma. To film buffs, this idea is largely considered sacrilege as he is often viewed as the heir to Alfred Hitchcock's throne. The new master of suspense. Quentin Tarantino went as far as to call him 'the greatest director of his generation', which is high praise indeed considering his classmates include Spielberg, Coppola and Scorsese. My beef is similar to my beef with, you guessed it, Hitch