Rating: 3.0★
Every so often a single performer is so magnetic that they drag an entire film up several rungs by sheer force of presence, and Dirty Dancing is one of the purest examples I can think of. Strip Patrick Swayze out of Emile Ardolino's 1987 hit and you are
FrightFest
There is no character in the whole of cinema who has been to the screen more often than Dracula, which means every new version arrives carrying an impossible weight. How do you say anything fresh about a story we have all seen dozens of times, from Lugosi through Christopher Lee
Rating: 3.0★
The most compelling story attached to Hollywood Shuffle isn't actually on the screen, and I mean that as a genuine compliment to Robert Townsend rather than a criticism of the film itself. Back in 1987, so fed up with an industry that kept slamming doors in his face,
Rating: 3.0★
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: 3.0★
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: 3.0★
Let's get the heresy out of the way immediately: I have never quite understood the rabid, unquestioning devotion to Sam Raimi's Evil Dead franchise. While the world collectively worships at the altar of cabin-in-the-woods terror, I've found myself consistently underwhelmed by
Rating: 3.0★
There's a moment early in Paranoid Park where the camera just lingers on a skate bowl, the concrete curves catching light in a way that feels almost underwater, and you think: right, this is going to be something special. Gus Van Sant has a gift for that kind
Rating: 3.0★
Being buried alive, getting lost underground, being swallowed by the dark with no way out: there are few fears more primal, more hardwired into us, than the ones that live beneath the surface. Neil Marshall gets that. The Descent understands, on a gut level, exactly what makes the idea of
Rating: 3.0★
There's a version of watching Under the Skin where the whole thing just washes over you, strange and cold and beautiful, and you walk out feeling vaguely disturbed in a way you can't quite put into words. There's another version where you spend half
Rating: 3.0★
Let's get one thing straight before anything else: the suit in this film is the best Spider-Man suit ever put to screen, full stop. That textured, crimson-and-blue design, worn by Andrew Garfield's lanky, skater-esque frame, gave the character a kinetic, grounded agility
Rating: 3.0★
Rachel Sennott made me queue this up. Simple as that. After being completely won over by her in Shiva Baby and Bottoms, I knew she was one of the most exciting young comic performers working right now, and I wasn't about to let a slasher-comedy with her
Rating: 3.0★
Ten films deep into a director's back catalogue and you start to think you know what you're getting. With George A. Romero, I thought I had a reasonable handle on it: sharp social commentary wrapped in viscera, monsters as metaphor, chaos as critique. Then I sat
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