|
|
John Wick: Chapter 4
(2023)
|
Ed Whitfield
|
There’s something about the relentlessness of Wick’s ordeal that stands above the generic action pictures that clog up the contemporary market place. These movies are superficial but they have a personality and an intensity that lingers in the memory.
Posted Mar 26, 2023
|
|
|
Scream VI
(2023)
|
Ed Whitfield
|
One’s left with the sense that the series has some untapped potential.
Posted Mar 19, 2023
|
|
|
Creed III
(2023)
|
Ed Whitfield
|
You can replicate the character dynamics of the original series & its story beats – you can chuck in an exhilarating montage, and direct the climatic showdown with style. But without the heart that powered the original movies, it’s a mechanical pastiche.
Posted Mar 19, 2023
|
|
|
Babylon
(2022)
|
Ed Whitfield
|
If anything, Babylon is too good a recreation of late-silent era Hollywood – it’s self-indulgent, overwrought, underwritten, and following a full-frontal assault on the senses, peters out into irrelevance.
Posted Jan 22, 2023
|
|
|
Avatar: The Way of Water
(2022)
|
Ed Whitfield
|
A fortune has been spent to return the movies to where they were a century ago.
Posted Dec 31, 2022
|
|
|
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
(2022)
|
Ed Whitfield
|
It’s a high-end game – a marble chess set.
Posted Dec 31, 2022
|
|
|
Blonde
(2022)
|
Ed Whitfield
|
An artful – sometimes pretentiously overwrought, and palpably aggressive attack on the male gaze and the portrait of a woman destroyed by the lust she induced in overstimulated males.
Posted Oct 02, 2022
|
|
|
Jurassic World Dominion
(2022)
|
Ed Whitfield
|
All concerned have made the audacious decision to relegate the dinosaurs – the marquee attractions, to the status of background extras.
Posted Jun 12, 2022
|
|
|
Top Gun: Maverick
(2022)
|
Ed Whitfield
|
Top Gun’s appeal is built on US exceptionalism, on competitive machismo, on bread and butter heroics. The sequel offers it polished and unreconstructed.
Posted Jun 06, 2022
|
|
|
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
(2022)
|
Ed Whitfield
|
Once rampant, the movie cannot be tamed.
Posted May 07, 2022
|
|
|
The Batman
(2022)
|
Ed Whitfield
|
If the film falls short of greatness, because Reeves didnt know when to cut and run, it is, in its final extended form, a superior comic book adaptation and brooding thriller in its own right.
Posted Mar 05, 2022
|
|
|
Scream
(2022)
|
Ed Whitfield
|
Signals we've moved into a new era where legacy sequels, in a bid to keep the wolf of audience weariness from the door of indifference, refer to their conception while sticking to the strategy point for point. This, as Scream '22 notes, is fooling no one.
Posted Jan 16, 2022
|
|
|
The Matrix Resurrections
(2021)
|
Ed Whitfield
|
One of the most passive aggressive mainstream movies of recent years - a film that both mocks the expectations of its imagined audience and the crude franchise revival imperative of its financial backers.
Posted Dec 23, 2021
|
|
|
Spider-Man: No Way Home
(2021)
|
Ed Whitfield
|
It's all part of a knowing scheme that repurposes what came before to create an Endgame sense of anticipation and payoff. It's wholly unearned, but you have to give producer Kevin Feige credit - recycling has never been this profitable.
Posted Dec 19, 2021
|
|
|
West Side Story
(2021)
|
Ed Whitfield
|
West Side Story's the same old story and the same old tunes. It looks and sounds great - a stylistic upgrade - but it's still a movie struggling to make the case for its existence.
Posted Dec 11, 2021
|
|
|
House of Gucci
(2021)
|
Ed Whitfield
|
A vulgar picture is painted. Its resemblance to its subjects is a matter of debate.
Posted Dec 06, 2021
|
|
|
Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City
(2021)
|
Ed Whitfield
|
Fans of the game will say it's an acceptable diversion. For the rest of us there is nothing.
Posted Dec 06, 2021
|
|
|
Ghostbusters: Afterlife
(2021)
|
Ed Whitfield
|
Jason Reitman, with the best intentions, has inherited the mantle but misunderstood the appeal of his Dad's film. He's turned Seinfeld into Family Ties.
Posted Nov 20, 2021
|
|
|
Eternals
(2021)
|
Ed Whitfield
|
What might have been a fascinating interplay of psychologies and ideas, is rendered in broad, lifeless strokes.
Posted Nov 13, 2021
|
|
|
Halloween Kills
(2021)
|
Ed Whitfield
|
Excess not success.
Posted Oct 23, 2021
|
|
|
Dune
(2021)
|
Ed Whitfield
|
Put the word out - someone at Warners has a gambling problem.
Posted Oct 22, 2021
|
|
|
The Last Duel
(2021)
|
Ed Whitfield
|
It's funny that The Last Duel should be a film about bravery...because on the issue the story explores, namely truth, it dare not trust its audience.
Posted Oct 17, 2021
|
|
|
No Time to Die
(2021)
|
Ed Whitfield
|
A kind of pastiche of the series proper - with Craig's mirthless, fragile Bond, out of place as well as time.
Posted Sep 30, 2021
|
|
|
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
(2021)
|
Ed Whitfield
|
Shang-Chi, from its flat composition and mechanical editing, to its low-key score, is a curiously muted offering.
Posted Sep 04, 2021
|
|
|
The Suicide Squad
(2021)
|
Ed Whitfield
|
James Gunn has spiced the broth but it's still thin and no substitute for a decent meal.
Posted Jul 31, 2021
|
|
|
F9 The Fast Saga
(2021)
|
Ed Whitfield
|
The lack of human interest stalls the engine and flips the vehicle.
Posted Jul 13, 2021
|
|
|
Black Widow
(2021)
|
Ed Whitfield
|
It's as if someone ripped out the movie's uterus.
Posted Jul 13, 2021
|
|
|
Godzilla vs. Kong
(2021)
|
Ed Whitfield
|
It's barely a movie.
Posted Apr 04, 2021
|
|
|
Zack Snyder's Justice League
(2021)
|
Ed Whitfield
|
The irresistible conclusion is that the film didn't need to be restored so much as remade; the first and most important stage in that reimagining being a new screenplay.
Posted Mar 22, 2021
|
|
|
Wonder Woman 1984
(2020)
|
Ed Whitfield
|
A breezy blockbuster, lacking any edge or character, is unlikely to convince millions to forsake the comfort of their living room and the known irritants in their household, for the unknowns of the multiplex.
Posted Dec 17, 2020
|
|
|
The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone
(1990)
|
Ed Whitfield
|
Its sin, in keeping with the religiosity that permeates it, is that it pulls us in to a psychodrama centred on Michael's autumn years and the ties that bind, only to leave us exactly where Part II did, decades earlier. What then, was the point?
Posted Dec 11, 2020
|
|
|
Mank
(2020)
|
Ed Whitfield
|
It took a bold impresario, naïve enough to be brave, to make Citizen Kane, but it required the kind of guy who vomits up an expensive dinner and placates his host with the line, "relax, the white wine came up with the fish", to write it.
Posted Dec 11, 2020
|
|
|
Bill & Ted Face the Music
(2020)
|
Ed Whitfield
|
Turns out that whatever Rufus told them, or whatever we were led to believe, back when men could be heroes, the Wyld Stallyns' real contribution to history were two lucky acts of ejaculation.
Posted Sep 19, 2020
|
|
|
Cuties
(2020)
|
Ed Whitfield
|
The audience may have some growing up to do.
Posted Sep 13, 2020
|
|
|
Unhinged
(2020)
|
Ed Whitfield
|
An unshoed nag with two broken legs that improbably became the star attraction on derby day.
Posted Aug 29, 2020
|
|
|
Tenet
(2020)
|
Ed Whitfield
|
If big entertainments want to be respected as intelligent entertainments, they must communicate with audiences clearly, not flit between the abstract and pretentious.
Posted Aug 29, 2020
|
|
|
Peter's Friends
(1992)
|
Ed Whitfield
|
What felt sincere and reassuring in 1992, seems indulgent and stilted today.
Posted Mar 29, 2020
|
|
|
The Invisible Man
(2020)
|
Ed Whitfield
|
A well-plotted thriller with horror trappings that deserves praise for finding a new and unsettling spin on an old premise.
Posted Feb 29, 2020
|
|
|
Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)
(2020)
|
Ed Whitfield
|
Content to be nihilistic and mean-spirited as an end in itself... it gives the audience not one character it can engage with emotionally or psychologically, leaving them adrift in a world of sensory overload and fetishized violence. In short, it's trash.
Posted Feb 09, 2020
|
|
|
Bad Boys for Life
(2020)
|
Ed Whitfield
|
I preferred the Boys when they were young and care free, and the characters understood it was better to burn out than fade away. Filmmakers used to understand that too. It's that understanding I'm nostalgic for.
Posted Feb 09, 2020
|
|
|
The Lighthouse
(2019)
|
Ed Whitfield
|
A gloriously bonkers two-hander.
Posted Feb 09, 2020
|
|
|
Parasite
(2019)
|
Ed Whitfield
|
One's left to wonder who's parasitically living off whom? The Kims off the Parks, or the Americans off their anti-communist allies?
Posted Feb 09, 2020
|
|
|
Bombshell
(2019)
|
Ed Whitfield
|
Bombshell does a reasonable job of telling the tale like a Fox story - establish the villain, castigate those involved for moral cowardice and political pragmatism, signal righteousness - but that extends to the synthetic ire.
Posted Jan 06, 2020
|
|
|
1917
(2019)
|
Ed Whitfield
|
Will have broad appeal and a long afterlife on Sunday afternoon TV, subject to the odd trim for language.
Posted Jan 06, 2020
|
|
|
Jojo Rabbit
(2019)
|
Ed Whitfield
|
Waititi opts to forego the affected solemnity usually associated with period, substituting it with something closer to the truth; a false consciousness and heightened acceptance of the absurd.
Posted Jan 06, 2020
|
|
|
Cats
(2019)
|
Ed Whitfield
|
You'll never forget it - though you will try.
Posted Dec 22, 2019
|
|
|
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker
(2019)
|
Ed Whitfield
|
Who'd have thought the filmmakers had so little confidence in their audience? Who'd have imagined the finished film would mirror the creative lethargy underpinning it so perfectly? It's slapped together, half-hearted, cynical and tired.
Posted Dec 19, 2019
|
|
|
Jumanji: The Next Level
(2019)
|
Ed Whitfield
|
Next level breezy.
Posted Dec 17, 2019
|
|
|
Motherless Brooklyn
(2019)
|
Ed Whitfield
|
A neo-noir with brains and social commentary to boot.
Posted Dec 09, 2019
|
|
|
Charlie's Angels
(2019)
|
Ed Whitfield
|
Charlie's Angels insults and patronises the built-in audience for this mediocre IP, i.e. men, without having any idea what a woman would want to see instead, assuming she'd be interested at all.
Posted Dec 01, 2019
|
