I think the musical may be the genre with the most ‘hall of fame classics’ thoroughly in the past, with nary a modern entry in sight. Ok, we’ve had La La Land, the A Star is Born remake and, I guess, Frozen and Coco on the animated side (and some will count Baby Driver) but they don’t quite fit the bill of what we’d class as the ‘classic watch it with the family on a rainy Sunday musical' (I’d also argue that Les Misérables and Sweeney Todd, whilst excellent, are a little on

I think it was whilst espousing the virtues of The Purge series that the theory arose that a solid ‘idea’ for a horror concept is generally enough. ‘All crime is legal for one night’ - great idea. ‘Horror rooted in silence because of monsters who can hear but not see’ - great idea. And so it is that A Quiet Place Part II triumphs despite so obviously being the ‘middle chapter’ of a trilogy (or more.) A concept like this one just works as a cinematic experience. After a bravur

Isn’t it great when you see a film that delivers on the expectation when going in you know it could have gone either way? Mad Max: Fury Road delivered in spades as did Blade Runner 2049, Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Joker. Following on from that latter masterpiece, and perhaps more surprising than the rest, is Disney’s Cruella. What could have been an easy cash-grab, back-to-the-cinema-or-watch-on-Disney+-for-a-small-fortune extension of their recent villain revival and l

As I mentioned yesterday in my end of year film round up, it can be tempting to write the year 2020 off as the absolute clusterf*ck it's...

As I present The Brighton Film Club’s Best Films of the Year list it’s all too tempting to slip into an inexorable rant about the state...

“Be excellent to each other” is quite the bodacious credo and should be adorning plenty more t-shirts. Despite this, does 2020 need a Bill & Ted remake/sequel? Probably not, but in this most strange of years a 29-years-later(!) sequel to a cult stoner film hardly registers as a footnote. All these 'super sequels' tend to do is make people feel old but, for a slacker comedy, Bill & Ted always had a very clear central message that music, and being kind to our fellow humans, cou

This article is a tribute to Alex Turner and the Arctic Monkeys who have a predilection to pepper their lyrics with delicious little pop...

In case you were wondering, a 'tenet' is actually defined as: "an opinion or principle held by a group or organisation, a creed." In Christopher Nolan’s long-awaited blockbuster the title Tenet actually is a sort of palindrome, referring to time moving forward and backwards by ten minutes, as it does in one of its major sequences. If you’ve just seen one of Nolan’s films, or even had one described to you, you’ll know that time is his muse. He pushes the boundaries of what’s p

The Brighton Film Club finally returns to the cinema and a quick word for the good people of Cineworld, Brighton who’ve not only given the place a funky refurb’ (tippy chairs!) but have also worked mighty hard to reopen and put suitable safety measures in place for those punters who just had to get back in front of a giant screen despite the blissful weather. A huge thank you from me. Release schedules are all over the place at the moment but, hopefully, bums on seats will en

Being without the cinema has been difficult for The Brighton Film Club. The buzz of seeing a new film amongst fellow fans is a feeling that I can’t wait to have back in a few weeks’ time as those theatre doors swing open again. In the meantime, it’s been fun to post the 'Isolation Inspiration' recommendations on Instagram and I've also been diving into some ‘best movies ever’ lists to try and broaden my own watched list ever further. The announcement that the cinemas are reop

Breaking records with Star Wars and the MCU, continuing success with their live-action remakes and less than a month before the launch of the Disney+ streaming service, the Disney train keeps on a-rolling. Their commitment to continuing quality and original content has been key to this inexorable rise, the critical jewels in the crown amongst the sequels and blockbusters. A lot of these gems have come from the Mouse House’s most critically adored wing: Pixar who, despite the

The Brighton Film Club has spoken a lot about videogame movies in the past. There are notoriously bad examples of the form but the general consensus is that they’re improving. I’m not sure that’s true. The turn towards po-faced, self-serious CGI-fests has given us some terrible ports which, whilst pretty, are far too cliched (think Warcraft, Assassin’s Creed, Need for Speed and Tomb Raider for some recent examples.) Having said that, the same problem occurs when you make a ti