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Remembering Peter Cullen (1941-2026)
Remembering Peter Cullen: the films of theirs I've reviewed, and a few words on the work.
Latest
2020s
Over/Under (2026)
I will admit to coming at Over/Under from a particular angle. I have a twelve year old daughter, and Sophia Silver's coming of age drama captures so much of what I see in her life right now, the shifting friendships, the first brushes with puberty, the endless
Rating: 2.5★
Peter Rabbit (2018)
Taking Beatrix Potter's genteel little watercolours and turning them into a wisecracking, action-scored family romp was always going to be a gamble, and Will Gluck's Peter Rabbit lands somewhere in the awkward middle. Not a disaster, not a triumph. Just a very expensive, very polished
Rating: 3.0★
The Gruffalo's Child (2011)
The best children's stories tend to be complete things. They say what they have to say, and then they stop. That is what made the original The Gruffalo so satisfying when it landed on BBC One that Christmas a couple of years earlier: it was tight, funny, structurally
Rating: 3.5★
Doctor Zhivago (1965)
Let's talk about the sheer, unadulterated audacity of what David Lean pulled off with this one. You look at those sweeping, snow-drenched landscapes and assume some magical winter wonderland was captured on celluloid, that the production company packed up and headed somewhere gloriously frozen for months on
Rating: 4.0★
mid90s (2018)
There's a very specific, visceral thump to the soundtrack of mid90s that hit me somewhere deep in the chest the moment it started. I was a skater kid growing up in the UK, and those tracks, that particular blend of hip hop and noise rock bleeding from a
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Remembering Tim Curry (1946-2026)
Remembering Tim Curry: the films of theirs I've reviewed, and a few words on the work.
Rating: 4.0★
The Gruffalo (2009)
If you've had a small child in the house at any point this century, you will know The Gruffalo more or less off by heart, whether you meant to or not. Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler's picture book is a fixture of British bedtimes, and there&
Rating: 3.0★
The Witches (1990)
My sister was physically sick watching this. Not metaphorically. Not "she felt a bit queasy." She threw up, right there on the living-room floor, in front of the telly, in the middle of a children's film. I have carried that image with me for decades,
Rating: 3.5★
The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
There is a very specific, almost hypnotic rhythm to a Wes Anderson picture. Whether you're watching The Grand Budapest Hotel or Fantastic Mr. Fox, you get this peculiar sensation that absolutely nothing is happening, even while the screen is bursting with meticulously choreographed activity. Characters drift through immaculately
Rating: 3.5★
Total Recall (1990)
There's a moment in Total Recall where you genuinely stop and ask yourself: is any of this actually happening? Paul Verhoeven plants that question early and never lets it go. Doug Quaid, a humble construction worker played with that trademark jaw-clenching physicality by Arnold Schwarzenegger, visits a
Rating: 3.5★
Quadrophenia (1979)
When I was sweating through my GCSEs, our school sent us off with an unusual piece of revision advice: go and watch Quadrophenia. Decades on, my daughter now sits in the same classrooms, and the same recommendation is still doing the rounds. There is something perfect about that continuity, because