Reviews

Beware the movie that comes bearing the message ‘what follows is based on a true story’. The truth usually ends up playing second fiddle to the story telling and Breathe, the directorial debut from the former Gollum-inhabiting Andy Serkis, is a prime example of this. Robin (Andrew Garfield) is a dashing young Sandhurst graduate, who leaves the Army and moves in to the tea-broker business, in the latter-half of the 1950s. Playing cricket one day, he claps eyes on the stunning, yet reputedly unattainable, Diana Blacker (Claire Foy). Immediately smitten, he smashes the ball for six, she’s duly impressed and, voila, we have a pair of star-crossed lovers. They marry, take-off to Africa, safari a bit, and pretty quickly Diana gets pregnant. Then, when things really couldn’t get any better, life ...

DC comics latest superhero outing had such a promising start; all the trailers promised a team match up to rival the likes of the extremely successful Marvel Avengers. However, these tantalising trailers failed to match expectation (a common trend when it comes to DC these days - with the exception of Nolan's Batman trilogy).

Here we go again. Does sex really sell? Well slammed in the face during the first scene we see the silhouettes of some people having. Now at first, I am thinking this is steamy Matthew McConaughey with some other people getting their freak on. Yum yum. I am sold I thought. Then we see that, in fact (yes although still McConaughey), it was Ron Woodroof! That is not the McConaughey I want to see in the very first scenes. Ron was not hot at all, and in fact, the total opposite. He looked like he was sick. Then again, I wonder if I hadn’t know him as hunky McConaughey in real life, maybe I wouldn't have been so critical. Ok. He could have just been a skinny fella. I have many thin men friends.

A true classic? I’d never actually seen it until the ripe old age of 21. That’s right, I’d avoided the actual film whilst shamelessly recreating the famous shower scene noise as an invisible knife was stabbed in the back of a friend (who hasn’t?!). I’d watched the endless countdowns like ‘the 100 scariest films’ and seen the infamous scene multiple times. I’d even answered pub questions on the ‘classic’ (wrongly I might add…but still) and yet never seen what is often argued as Hitchcock’s greatest. That recently all changed thanks to @skymovies and a ridiculously long Easter break provided by my uni. Even 53 years on (yes it really has been that long) you can understand why people love it so much and why they’ve made a film, on the making of the film [Hitchcock 2013]. Despite the shots bei...

In 12 Years A Slave, during the very first scene, watching the lashing of Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), brought flashbacks of the opening scenes from Saving Private Ryan. So brutal was it from the beginning, which clearly was an attempt to hit the viewer with a powerful punch to provoke Hollywood film grade entertainment. But did it work and was it necessary?