BY ROGER WATSON I cannot see many mothers being proud of this film. Mother’s Pride is a film which, given the cast, simply could not fail…yet it does. Heavily, and very misleadingly, trailered on television and promising so much, the film was a cross between cinematic fireworks – with too much going on – and a damp squib, with none of the fireworks exploding. The … Continue reading Mother’s Pride
BY ROGER WATSON This apocalyptic film is entirely about the journey and most certainly not about the ending; there isn’t one. That isn’t a spoiler, but established common knowledge from existing reviews. A House of Dynamite (2025) adopts a familiar theme: an ‘incoming’ threat. An unidentified aggressor—presumed to be North Korea, though China and Russia are considered and dismissed—launches a suspected nuclear missile from somewhere in the … Continue reading A House of Dynamite
BY ROGER WATSON Scoring a well-deserved 88% on Rotten Tomatoes, The Long Walk (2025) is the most dystopian of dystopian films. Written by Richard Bachman (aka Stephen King) the title describes the content of the film perfectly. Set in the 1970s and following a major war, the United States has become a military dictatorship. Morale in the country is poor and, to bolster it and … Continue reading The Long Walk
BY ROGER WATSON Attracted to this film by the fact that Julia Roberts was playing the lead role, my wife and I snuggled down for two hours and eighteen minutes of entertainment. In the end all we got were two hours and eighteen minutes of our lives that we will never get back. Even if we did get them back, we would not relive them … Continue reading After the Hunt
BY ROGER WATSON If ever there was a film that deserved the subtitle ‘Or what the Hell is going on?’ it’s The Unholy Trinity (released in 2025 in the United States) which only scores 40% on Rotten Tomatoes. Starring Pierce Brosnan as the sheriff of Trinity in 1870s Montana and the ubiquitous Samuel L Jackson as a gun-toting preacher, it should have done better. The … Continue reading The Unholy Trinity
BY ROGER WATSON Based on the 1981 novel of the same name by Robert Littell, The Amateur (2025) tells the improbable story of a geek turned gunman in pursuit of his wife’s killers. It is an action, suspense thriller and, as such, is diverting enough, but is probably scored accurately at 61% on Rotten Tomatoes. At times it is a bit lacking in action, and you must … Continue reading The Amateur
BY ROGER WATSON I briefly owned a copy of The Book of Mormon which reached me in extraordinary circumstances a few years ago while checking into the Hamilton hotel in Washington DC. “There’s a parcel for you Mr Watson”, I was told and a package containing a copy of The Book of Mormon was handed to me. A Facebook friend, and Mormon, had asked where … Continue reading Heretic
BY ROGER WATSON I came to Bob Dylan relatively late. It wasn’t until university that a girlfriend introduced me to Nashville Skyline (1969)—his most country-influenced album, and my belated introduction to Johnny Cash, who duets with Dylan on Girl from the North Country. I wasn’t exactly hooked, but I liked a few songs. Everything changed the following year when I moved in with my cousin, … Continue reading A Complete Unknown
BY ROGER WATSON The film Sisu, made in 2022, had passed me by. A box office success on its release in the United States, I don’t recall it being shown in the United Kingdom. But it is available now on Netflix and if you like a good revenge movie with Nazis dying in ways you never imagined possible, then Sisu is the film for you. … Continue reading Sisu
BY ROGER WATSON Canary Black (2024) is a right load of old nonsense. But when your Gulf Air flight to Bahrain, already delayed by three hours, sits at the stand with you on board for a further three hours, this is the perfect kind of nonsense to pass the time. For a start there is Kate Beckinsale, looking good in a jump suit and knocking … Continue reading Canary Black
BY ROGER WATSON Why anyone would go to see Conclave, a film about the secretive proceedings behind locked doors at the Vatican – thus ‘conclave’ – in the election of a new Pope, is unclear. But they have, in their droves. It is a box office success netting $75 million worldwide and scoring 93% positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes and 86% on their Popcornmeter of … Continue reading Conclave
BY MAX WALLER My immediate first impression after watching Yorgos Lanthimos’ ‘Poor Things’ (2024) was that it is essentially an expensive, surreal and hyper-expressionist Hammer horror-style movie for the 21st century with a considerable number of Tinto Brass-like sex scenes thrown in for good measure. Whatever aspirations it has to say something meaningful I’m not so sure it succeeds but it certainly attempts to have … Continue reading The Emancipation Of Bella Baxter
BY ANDREW MOODY “Made it ma! TOP OF THE WORLD!” Most media critics falsely claim that we are living in the “Golden age of TV”, based on Hollywood’s constant production of TV boxsets for streaming services like Netflix. We are actually, in a media sense, living in the Golden age of consumer choice. Nowadays, technology far in excess of that which sent the Apollo 11 … Continue reading The Public Enemy
BY ANDREW MOODY “We are all the children of DW Griffith and Stanley Kubrick.” –Martin Scorsese * On the Saturday before Christmas, I decided to do something I’d always wanted to do but had never gotten round to: I sat down and watched all of Stanley Kubrick’s final six movies in a row, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), A Clockwork Orange (1971), Barry Lyndon … Continue reading The Kubrick Variations
BY ANDREW MOODY “Had the Weinsteins been born seventy five years earlier, they might have been found running numbers on Hester Street, bootlegging whiskey, or sitting across a card table from Louis Lepke, the head of Murder Incorporated.” In the years following Miramax producer Harvey Weinstein’s arrest, trial and conviction for sex offences, Hollywood has been in a state of free fall. Weinstein was arrested … Continue reading Down & Dirty Pictures
BY SARAH GREENWOOD A note follows from Sarah to Dai Bradley (pictured twice below), who played Billy Casper in Barry Hines’ film ‘Kes’. Sarah met Dai/Billy at a showing of Hines’ film The Gamekeeper in Barnsley last month. Ay up Billy! Asta got tahm for a chat? A’ just want t’ clear summat up after that talk we ‘ed ‘t’other neet. at’t Civic It wor … Continue reading The Gamekeeper Revisited
BY GARY MCGHEE Love yourself. Two little words with a very big meaning. All else flows from them, the trajectory of your life, the meaning of it, the truths, the experiences, the decisions you make, the sense of your place in the world and what you can achieve in it. Without self-love you are bereft, compromised, emotionally undone, adrift, fated to not live a life … Continue reading Heartbreak Mountain
BY ANDREW MOODY When I was six years old, my Dad took me to see Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Like Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), the first of the Indy films, the movie concerned a race to discover a biblical artefact (in Raiders it was the Ark of the Covenant, in Last Crusade it was the Holy Grail) before the Nazis could … Continue reading Another Indiana Jones Movie?
BY ANDREW MOODY Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 epic horror movie The Shining has terrified and puzzled audiences for four decades. Stephen King, who wrote the novel that Kubrick adapted, called the movie “maddening and perverse”, and like watching a brilliant ice skater doing nothing but endless figure eights. Steven Spielberg, a close friend of Kubrick’s, admitted he didn’t get it, that it was histrionic and too … Continue reading Room 237
BY ANDREW MOODY Sergio Leone is widely regarded as one of the best and most innovative directors in cinema history. His trilogy of 1960s Westerns starring Clint Eastwood as the stranger, (or the Man With No Name) have settled into iconic status. It was actually the American distributor United Artists that played up the No Name concept as a way of selling the movies to … Continue reading Get Three Coffins Ready
