Articles Posted in the " Featured " Category

  • WIN: A Simple Life on DVD

    A Simple Life is an affecting and finely wrought depiction of a very unremarkable sort of love, and we think it’s brilliant. You will too, which is convenient as we have three DVD copies to give away!


  • The Master

    Five time Oscar nominee Paul Thomas Anderson is back with 2012’s most anticipated film (that doesn’t feature a comic book hero or James Bond). But is his controversial take on Scientology up to scratch? The Anderson stamp gleams back at you from every polished frame, but beneath all the style there’s something missing from The Master‘s heart.


  • Frankenweenie

    Frankenweenie sees Tim Burton return not only to his 1984 short-film of the same name – and not only to the stop-motion animation style he utilised on Corpse Bride – but also to the sort of smart, Gothic quasi-horror that made his name. And the results are, pleasingly, very much the Tim Burton of old.



  • Resident Evil: Retribution

    While critically condemned, the Resident Evil franchise has nevertheless achieved considerable commercial success and enjoyed a wide audience. That’s all likely to change after Resident Evil: Retribution, a film so laughably incapable, so shamelessly derivative and so woefully unengaging that it’ll likely succeed where its zombie antagonists have failed… in mortally wounding Milla Jovovich’s Alice.


  • Dredd

    Put that Stallone-starring abomination from 1995 right out of your head – Director Pete Travis’ Dredd is a much more focused and faithful adaptation of science fiction comic 2000AD’s most famous and enduring strip, even if a lack of depth and some bland action stop it achieving greatness.


  • Clone

    Matt Smith (yes, Doctor Who) and Eva Green (yes, Eva Green) made this in 2010. Originally called Womb, it had to be rebranded as Clone for the UK DVD release. The story of a woman who clones and gives birth to her dead boyfriend, you’d think this would be amazing sci-fi, or at least amazingly bad, but in fact it’s just a beautifully shot, but painfully dull story, lacking the gross factor, the sci-fi factor or even the moral debate about the concept of cloning factor. Matt Smith is great though.


  • The Bourne Legacy

    Rarely has a film with so much hype failed so horribly to deliver. Director Tony Gilroy seems to think he could get away with remaking the first Bourne, except without the amnesia. Or the excitement, characters, wit, joy, love interest, narrative, decent plot or action sequences. The fourth film, with its ‘wider conspiracy’ and all those ‘rewards for paying attention’ we were promised, is entirely uninspiring and utterly soulless.


  • Ice Age: Continental Drift

    Ice Age 4 hurtles from one boring and entirely unoriginal scenario to another, justifying its glaring historical and chronological inaccuracies, hopeless characters, tedious plot and joyless slapstick by covering them in frozen precipitation. It’s just a rehash of previous Ice Age themes and scenes from other, better films, but told by prehistoric animals that existed millions of years apart. Sure it’s for kids, but a cinema full of children could only muster the occasional half-hearted chuckle and even the sound of Sid regurgitating something into his paw couldn’t mask the sound of artistic integrity quietly dying.


  • The Five-Year Engagement

    The director and star of Forgetting Sarah Marshall reunite for another offbeat romantic comedy designed to tug on your heartstrings, elbow your tearducts and rabbit-punch your laughter glands in equal measure. The Five-Year Engagement is perfectly watchable, but should rom-coms really be this bloody miserable?