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I wasn't going to bother with Jennifer's Body. I liked Diablo Cody's first produced script, Juno, but the buzz about this second offering wasn't good, and let's face it, Megan Fox isn't much of an actor. (At least going by...

Posted at 11:50 PM in BD Impressions

Combining two Clive Barker short stories, The Book of Blood and On Jerusalem Street, this low budget horror offering is actually a better film than the critics would have you believe, albeit one that is hampered by some major leaps...

Posted at 11:54 PM in BD Impressions

Generally speaking, my experience with films is that I tend to start out engaged, but then find myself flagging a little towards the end of the second act, only for me to reconnect with it during the final act as...

Posted at 9:42 PM in BD Impressions

I suspect I have a slight preference for From Russia with Love, but it's easy to see why Goldfinger is so popular and considered, by some, to be the quintessential Bond. It has it all: witty one-liners, absurd gadgets, intricate...

Posted at 11:45 PM in BD Impressions

The voice-over at the start of (500) Days of Summer assures us that "this is not a love story", but on reflection, I can't quite work out what it else was meant to be. Essentially a tale about a romantic...

Posted at 2:06 PM in BD Impressions

I'm not sure what else I expected, really. I won't be so presumptuous as to claim that Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is the worst film of the decade. What I do feel fairly confident in stating is that, with...

Posted at 11:38 AM in BD Impressions

Yes, it's a better film than Dr. No. It's actually an improvement in just about every conceivable way: it's grander in terms of both scale and ambition, the narrative is consistently engaging, and despite the continued presence of SPECTRE (a...

Posted at 3:45 PM in BD Impressions

In his review of Inglourious Basterds, Mark Kermode said that the film had some good ideas in it but didn't really work as a whole, or words to that effect. While I like Quentin Tarantino's latest opus a lot more...

Posted at 5:03 PM in BD Impressions

Last night was my very first time watching the very first James Bond film, a title that has somehow managed to elude me all these years. Still, in a sense I'm glad I waited so long, because watching it for...

Posted at 2:01 PM in BD Impressions

I have a story to share with you. The other night, we decided to celebrate Christmas early and belatedly toast the dearly departed John Hughes by popping in the BD release of Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. It's...

Posted at 3:28 PM in BD Impressions

One of my favourite films of all time. I've already written about it here, so if you want to know why I like it so much, click the link. Image quality: Amelie's first BD release came in September 2008, a...

Posted at 7:03 PM in BD Impressions

There's a big danger in making films about what is essentially something that, in real life, would be very boring, for the obvious reason that you run a high risk of the film itself becoming boring. This is a trap...

Posted at 10:00 PM in BD Impressions

Anyone remember the infuriating trend in the 1980s of resurrecting classic cartoon characters and creating baby versions of them? This creativity-deprived craze gave rise to The Tom & Jerry Kids Show, Flintstone Kids, Tiny Toon Adventures and other such dreck....

Posted at 2:41 PM in BD Impressions

Nobody makes films quite like Luc Besson. Well, okay, "makes" is a bit of a stretch in the case of these two films, given that he didn't actually direct them but rather, like Danny the Dog, the Transporter movies and...

Posted at 3:49 PM in BD Impressions

Until I saw Max Manus (I refuse to use the "Man of War" subtitle that the UK distributors added, and which gives the impression of a very different film) tonight, I don't think I'd ever seen a Norwegian film before....

Posted at 12:27 AM in BD Impressions

For my overall impressions of Up, please see my review of the theatrical screening. It was very nice to watch the film again in the comfort of my home, not surrounded by rowdy children. The experience was vastly superior overall,...

Posted at 10:45 PM in BD Impressions

I first came across North by Northwest many years ago, when staying up past 9 PM was a novelty. I happened to dip into an already underway TV broadcast of it, and my first introduction to Roger Thornhill was of...

Posted at 3:48 PM in BD Impressions

On his Radio 5 film review show on Friday, Mark Kermode argued that Wes Anderson's recent stop motion animation adaptation of Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr. Fox (he slated it - deservedly, judging by the trailer) simply served to show up...

Posted at 12:02 PM in BD Impressions

Ah, the early 00s - a time when the horror genre hadn't yet gone down the route of remaking every single scary movie from the 70s but, by the same token, had only just shaken off the spectre of the...

Posted at 1:31 PM in BD Impressions

More like the edge of boredom, upon which I tottered for the duration of this biopic of playwright Dylan Thomas, told primarily from the perspectives of the two women in his life. Despite being beautifully shot by John Maybury (The...

Posted at 11:02 AM in BD Impressions

Although its annoyingly smug narration device does grate at times, Shane Black's Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is a riotously enjoyable and appropriate convoluted twenty-first century take on 40s film noir conventions, with Robert Downey Jr. and Val Kilmer serving well...

Posted at 1:58 PM in BD Impressions

Would it be an exaggeration to suggest that Transsiberian is the sort of film Alfred Hitchcock would have made if he had still been alive in 2008? The designers of the UK cover art certainly saw the similarities. Myself, I...

Posted at 12:32 PM in BD Impressions

Angel-A, Luc Besson's return to the director's chair after a seven-year hiatus, is certainly derivative. Highly reminiscent of a Parisian It's a Wonderful Life, it also has obvious parallels with another French film, Patrice Leconte's La fille sur le pont,...

Posted at 1:57 PM in BD Impressions

Let's get the downsides of Drag Me to Hell out of the way right off the bat. Yes, it's true, there is an over-abundance of CGI effects and a lot of them are cringe-inducingly bad. Also, while a number of...

Posted at 12:40 PM in BD Impressions

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is, of course, Disney's first and the first North American animated feature (although not, as it happens, the first animated feature, despite more than seventy years of misinformation) - "the one that started it...

Posted at 2:10 PM in BD Impressions