Why is it that modern blockbusters just seem very ordinary? This is a genuine question. We’re seeing an awful lot of great looking, great sounding, funny and entertaining films that are absolutely stacked with great casts which are just distinctly ‘meh.’ Is it the sheer amount of new films, the increasing competition in a market now competing with equally big-budget TV or a lack of originality? Death on the Nile is the most recent example. Is it great looking? Absolutely: lo

It definitely seems unfair to criticise a film for being exactly what you expect it to be and, more to the point, exactly what it sets out to be as well. I’m, therefore, going to swing that into a positive and declare that Moonfall is the film you’ll be hoping it is when you enter the multiplex, for good or ill. Sometimes a big, hare-brained disaster film is what you want of an evening and what better daft concept than ‘the moon’s falling into the earth because aliens.’ Rolan

Take a trip down Nightmare Alley for an early contender for the end-of-year tally-up. The latest from Guillermo del Toro, and following a four-year wait after his Oscar win for The Shape of Water, is a suitably creepy and fantastical adaptation of the 1946 novel following the rise and fall of a mysterious drifter-type character who falls in with a carnival troupe in 1930’s America and learns to be a psychic and mesmerist. It’s an absolutely riveting story set in a time period

With apologies for the lack of reviews posted after cinema trips to catch Last Night in Soho, Eternals, King Richard, Spencer, Petite Maman and C’mon C’mon last year (as well as digital releases Red Notice, Finch and Don’t Look Up and a second viewing of Spider-Man: No Way Home – it’s just as good second time around) it’s a resumption of normal service in 2022 for The Brighton Film Club and what a place to start as no less than the great Paul Thomas Anderson has come out of t

In some ways, it's wrong to be grateful for the sheer amount of movies released this year. Last year's delays and cancellations because...

Christmas and the end of the year is always a good time to reflect as well as look forward. Once again, the year has been spent swinging...

Like with Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Avengers: Endgame, it's difficult to know where to begin with writing a review of Spider-Man: No Way Home. With confidence that you'll likely go and see it anyway, or maybe already have, all that there is to say is: you'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll cheer, you'll feel the sense that this is a potentially game-changing endeavour. It feels like the first REAL Phase 4 film and, although you could reflect on it after and perhaps feel its

Well, Denis Villeneuve is certainly ballsy. Already one of the most exciting directors around before he, somehow, made a Blade Runner sequel that sits right up there with the original, he then set pulses racing and dissenters commenting all over again by daring to adapt one of the most daunting 'unfilmable' novels: Dune. The great David Lynch couldn't even make a passable version of the famously dense text (although that wasn't solely his fault), a book so influential in the

Film is an amazing art form for showing us just how little we’ve changed over time. It can affirm its point in a heavy-handed or light-touch way but the experience of watching and listening to a story can often be the most effective way to get a message across. Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel is set in the late 1300’s but is an all-too-relatable tale of abuse, societal and political failings and how truth can change wildly from one person to another. Based on the true story of F

The Cineworld screening for Venom: Let There Be Carnage on a Monday evening was nigh-on full. Is this a positive thing? A sign that the superhero genre is losing none of its stranglehold on audiences and that those audiences are happy to embrace the comfort and joy of the cinema after the misery of Covid? Or should it be taken as a sign that, like queues at fuel stations, the British public can’t be trusted? A difficult quandary, but it’s right to focus on the joy of seeing a

No Time to Die (finally) comes to us almost 'From Daniel Craig (and the gang) With Love' as the postscript to his tenure that almost never was (I guess he’s now learned to 'Never Say Never Again.') Craig’s, no doubt, been an exceptional Bond but his films have often been muddled. Like Brosnan before him, another excellent Bond whose films suffered by reflecting the 'Spectre' of the noughties' obsession with lacklustre CGI and silly future tech’, Craig’s films have had to surv

I’ve mentioned before, in a previous post, that The Brighton Film Club is attempting to construct the definitive list of ‘music films’: representing everything from biopics, movies with great soundtracks and musicians acting. Representing a musician’s life in film is a really tricky thing and constitutes a number of factors (including how closely involved the artist or their family are in its creation) and it’s no wonder that certain biopics absolutely soar and just 'feel lik