George Lucas is guilty of a lot of things: Jar Jar, crude (clumsy if I’m being generous) racial stereotyping, messing with fond childhood memories when they should stay resolutely unmessed with. But it’s hats off time today. George has done something that is generous and amusing, all at the same time.
I have a lot of time for Marion Cotillard – Mrs Plex will allow me the indulgence of suggesting that she’s rather foxy (and French – go figure), plus she’s a rather fine actress. She is also, it appears, batshit crazy. I won’t detain you from the juicy Dark Knight gossip for long, but let’s just say she has doubts that Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon and she subscribes to the theory that 9/11 was an elaborate demolition job with several thousand unfortunates caught up in the middle of it. Like I say: a few onions short of a necklace.
Spoilers ahoy after the jump.
Martin Scorcese’s best films are the ones that deal with greed and mania, and his latest – The Wolf of Wall Street – fits the template perfectly. The film is an adaptation of a mamoir by Jordan Befort; Belfort was a Master of the Universe, a trader who experienced a meteoric rise and then suffered the inevitably precipitious fall. The good times saw him immerse himself in drugs, loose women and fast living, but his hubris was repaid with 22 months in jail.
Sony Pictures have released a set of new stills for the upcoming action thriller Total Recall this week.
Yes, that’s right. We have even more new posters for Rupert Sander’s upcoming fairytale re-telling, Snow White And The Huntsman.
Thanks to a certain vampiric phenomenon, bloodsuckers are still all the rage on the big screen and The Last Voyage of the Demeter has just found itself a director in the form of Centurion's Neil Marshall.
With the release of the first trailer for Oscar-winning director William Friedkin’s latest film, Killer Joe, earlier this month, we now also have the film’s first poster.
This year is Charles Dickens' bicentennial and as one of the stalwarts of English literature, there have been numerous books, adaptations and documentaries celebrating the life and work of one of our favourite British institutions over the past few months. His novels have been a staple of our period-drama loving culture for decades and in amongst all the cobbled streets, fog-ridden scenery and extensive costume departments, there's something that we audiences can't get enough of.
As part of the Charles Dickens bicentennial celebrations, classic adaptations are being re-released and, despite the sheer volume of Dickens-based features out there, The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1947) still holds up as a fairly faithful rendering of a much-loved classic. Directed by Alberto Cavalcanti, the film belongs to the wonderful tradition of Dickens adaptations on screen that conveys a Victorian England full of waifs, strays and villainous characters desperate to make money any which way they can. Nicholas Nickleby is one of the favourites of the Dickens canon, a young man attempting to find his way in the world and encountering all manner of social caricatures.
With films such as Fright Night (1985,) The Monster Squad (1987) and Night of the Comet (1984,) comedy horror enjoyed a brief but glorious vogue in the mid-Eighties. It's bloodstained high-water mark was surely Return of the Living Dead (1985,) writer-director Dan O'Bannon's riotous take on the zombie genre.
