Rating: 2.0★
By the early 1990s, the RoboCop franchise had already begun to show the strain that comes with any Hollywood property asked to keep producing sequels beyond its natural lifespan. The original 1987 film, directed by Paul Verhoeven, was a genuinely sharp piece of work: a satirical, R-rated skewering of
Rating: 4.0★
When Sony Pictures Animation released Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse in 2018, it landed with the force of something genuinely new. The film collapsed the boundary between comic-book page and cinema screen in a way that felt less like a technical trick and more like a philosophical statement
Rating: 4.5★
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse arrives at an interesting moment in the long, occasionally exhausting history of superhero cinema. By 2018, the Marvel Cinematic Universe had been a going concern for a decade, and audiences had grown well-acquainted with its particular rhythm: the quippy banter, the world-ending
Rating: 3.5★
By 1990, RoboCop had already earned its place as one of the more pointed pieces of science fiction cinema to come out of the previous decade. Paul Verhoeven's 1987 original was a film that used the Detroit crime wave, the rise of corporate privatisation, and Reagan-era excess
Rating: 3.0★
Coming-of-age cinema has always had a complicated relationship with discomfort. The genre works best when it refuses to sand down the rougher edges of adolescence, and Marielle Heller's debut feature, adapted from Phoebe Gloeckner's semi-autobiographical 2002 graphic novel of the same name, is
Rating: 3.5★
Stephen King's relationship with cinema is a long and uneven one. For every faithful adaptation that captures the specific flavour of dread he does so well on the page, there are several that miss the point entirely, reducing his work to either slick gore or toothless television fare.
Rating: 3.0★
George A. Romero's name is so thoroughly bound up with the living dead that any film of his sitting outside that tradition tends to get overlooked. Monkey Shines, released in 1988 through Orion Pictures, is a case in point: a psychological horror thriller adapted from Michael Stewart'
Rating: 3.0★
There is something quietly remarkable about a film arriving from New Zealand and the Cook Islands in 2003 under the banner of a production consortium that includes a wellness company (Morinda, Inc, the juice brand, whose involvement in family film financing is exactly as odd as it sounds) and a
Rating: 4.5★
By the turn of the millennium, Steven Soderbergh had already established himself as one of American cinema's more restless and unpredictable talents. His debut, sex, lies, and videotape, had announced him as a filmmaker with a sharp eye for moral discomfort and an instinct for character-driven drama.
Rating: 3.5★
Jeffrey Eugenides published his debut novel The Virgin Suicides in 1993 to considerable critical attention, praised for its unusual collective narration and its unflinching portrait of suburban American grief. It took a few years to make the journey to the screen, but when it did, the adaptation landed in the
Rating: 2.5★
Orson Welles arrived in Hollywood in 1941 carrying a reputation so enormous it was almost comical. His radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds had reportedly sent listeners into a panic, and his debut feature, Citizen Kane, was already drawing comparisons to the very best the medium had produced.
Edinburgh International Film Festival
Thom Lunshof's First Zone, a Dutch post-apocalyptic drama premiering In Competition at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. Beautifully shot and scored with a strong lead, but a world left frustratingly unexplained.
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