Film Reviews by LW

This sequel is being unfairly compared to Terminator 2's shift from horror thriller to action. A much fairer comparison is between the earlier and later incarnations of Chucky in the Child's Play franchise. The horror element of Megan was the extent to which an AI behaves as a consequence of what we instruct it to do and how unexpected and literal this can be. In Megan 2.0 the killer doll gets to mock how it manipulates people by sifting their personal data. Megan may or may not be truly sentient, which adds some suspense to the film, but she is full of foul mouthed, scathing and exasperated observations about humans in the digital world and how AI is merely a mirror of humanity's online life. I thought the film a fun way of playing with the idea that AI is just a collection of our own best and worst interests taken to their uninhibited conclusion.

As far as the plot goes there is a quick catch up that sees the lives of Megan's creator and her daughter threatened as part of a conspiracy involving a rogue government robot that uses Megan's code. The original Megan, thriving as a computer virus and happily manipulating things ti fulfil her core mission of protecting her unsuspecting creators, springs into action to unravel the plot and save them with her own ruthless methods. Car chases, infiltrations, secret labs, robot fights, dance numbers, evil corporations, psychotic tech bros, genre in jokes and expletive laden quips from the killer doll ensue.

If you liked Chucky in his dafter moments you might warm to Megan's tongue in cheek action thriller make over.

This is an efficient slasher where the killer plans to use sharks as part of a bizarre sacrifice. The final girl sees him for the self justifying misogynistic numpty he is and sets out to turn the tables. There is little shark action for the gore hounds, but there is plenty of tension as our heroine tries one trick after another to turn the tables. Expect a thriller rather than a killer shark flick and you'll find a brisk and efficient thriller with a smart lead and a memorably unpleasant villain.

There is nothing intrinsically bad about this reincarnation of Nosferatu, but little real purpose beyond moody visuals. There is clearly signposted contrast between the beauty of life and its inevitable union with decay that marks the symbolic climax and not a lot else. It certainly lacks the reimagined elements of Werner Herzog's 1970s remake. The main thing I will say is that the ten minutes of ship board action is a better Last Voyage of the Demeter than Last Voyage of the Demeter was.

I have to be one of those people who writes a review and says that, after 30 tedious and unoriginal minutes of lazy plotting, I turned it off and read the wikipedia plot synopsis. I don't feel I missed anything.

This sees a cast against type James Gandolfini and an equally hapless Julia Louis-Dreyfus as two hesitant divorcees looking for middle aged romance and making a mess of things. It is a gentle and bitter sweet affair where Gandolfini gets the best dry lines and Dreyfus handles the cringe humour and the slapstick sight gags based on her petite size. This is a well observed character sketch of two people at a brief moment in their lives and not quite being sure if the other is what they want any more than either wants to be alone. A fine and quiet drama.

A small boy lives in fear of his peculiar and overbearing parents, do their abusive rules have a purpose and why do they seem so afraid? At first the voice he begins to hear at night terrifies him, then it begins to offer him a way out of his predicament and then it inevitably turns out not to be as it seems. The uneasy and threatening psychological build up will keep you guessing, but any film of this type has to show its beastie sooner or later and for some viewers that might detract from the work the cast do cranking uo the tension before the creeps give way to action.

The main reason to watch this is for the final appearance of the legendary Tony Todd. Despite his rapidly declining health Todd appears one last time to explain the rules of death and to give a more hopeful message to the doomed youngsters seeking his aid.

This entry has an awesome opening disaster that the film struggles to live up to. There are some inconsistencies with established lore and some suitably horrifying demises, but nothing new gets added to the franchise to develop the concept.

Tony Todd will be sadly missed though and this is why I recommend a watch to say farewell to a genre icon.

If 28 Days later was a slick undead thriller with some new moves and nothing much to say then 28 Weeks later upped the body count, deployed a terrifying Robert Carlisle and did a nifty bit of Iraq allegory. 28 Years later falls well short of either.

This is dull. Epically dull. It feels more like clunky 1970s folk horror than any attempt at building a plausible post apocalyptic world. Anyone with any knowledge of human civilization knows that the society on show is technologically nonsense from where they get their beer to how the landscape looks. The geography of Lindisfarne is CGI edited to make the plot work and that adds to the immersion breaking nonsense. The quarantined Britain is a lazy middle class Brexit anxiety that also breaks the immersion. The satire isn't satirical because it comes across as sincerely believed and condescending rather than tongue in cheek commentary (Britain has devolved to be full of zombie cave people but one has an uninfected baby so there is hope).

The worst part is the utter, predictable tedium though. To pad out Garland's lazy script and mumbling and banal dialogue, Boyle interrupts scenes with snippets of other movies, snippets from 28 Weeks Later, news reel fragments and overlays it with discordant white noise. It takes 90 seconds to read the wiki synopsis of this whole film and you get nothing more by sitting through two hours of it.

When Alex Garland delivers he delivers and when he doesn't you get this and this falls even below Civil War as tedious, pompous dross rather than the heights of work like Sunshine. 28 Days Later was a solid offering from Boyle and Garland that set up an intelligent sequel by a better writer. Despite the attempt to sneer at their fellow Britons the only thing that has gone backward is this franchise because this is a truly regressive bit of unimaginative, drab, indulgent, smugness.

I wasn't overly fond of The Batman but I was intrigued by an unrecognisable Colin Farrell as The Penguin. This spin off series serves as an origins tale that retreads the familiar fall of Gotham's old underworld and the rise of its more manic and colourful villains. The Penguin works as a crime drama because Farrell delivers a horribly plausible sociopath. His Penguin is a character you root for despite his being a manipulative, self serving killer who has no redeeming features, but is excellent at faking them, conning the audience as well as his victims. The episodes are perfectly paced and lurch from cliffhanger to cliffhanger with breathless pace. Like the other antagonists you are drawn along with the momentum of Farrell's scheming Oz Cobb as he wheels, deals and betrays his way to the top of Gotham. The series even manages to end with a cruel and downbeat finish that reminds us what the consequences of trusting in monsters can be. There are also a few hints at future developments in this iteration of the DC franchise.

An FBI agent and a witness end up in a plane over the Alaskan wilderness with a pilot they don't trust and uncertain if their allies on the ground. Everything proceeds efficiently, Wahlberg is effectively unpleasant and there are enough twists and turns about who on the ground can be trusted. At less than 90 minutes this is simple thriller doesn't outstay its welcome or try and drag out the simple premise either.

I liked the charm of Venom's first two outings. This garbled plot is not on a par with its predecessors. The film manages the usual bad action movie trick of being overly long and rushing its insubstantial plot to the point of incoherence. Very much in the category of, 'only watch if there is nothing else on and I can't get off the sofa'.

I quite liked the Sonic outing. This latest segment is total gibberish. Jim Carrey's manic Dr Robotnik was the stand out of the previous films but in this version the inane animated characters and weak CGI even Carrey can't save it.

Astronauts witness a nuclear war from the International Space Station and turn on each other with murderous paranoia. This could have said something about the futility of conflict, the transcendence of scientific co-operation, the futility of humanity in the vastness of space or even been a tense thriller. It never really does any of these things, it leans one way, then another, it looks too cheap to thrill but not so cheap as to be embarrassing, a bit of action, a bit of paranoia and there is the usual band of characters so flawed you wonder how they survived training for space. The whole thing is average and non commital. It passes the time but is totally forgettable.

This film is a bizarre mess. It seems more pastiche than serious attempt at creating the atmosphere of Chandler's down at heel investigator and his cynical forays into the overlapping worlds of the venal rich and the lethal sleaze of L.A.'s underbelly. This is not a Chandler story and it shows painfully. To make matters worse the entire cast is geriatric. This is set in the 1930s before Chandler's first novel and shows a 70 something Neeson playing a character who should be stocky, hard hitting man in his mid 30s, not a pensioner. The whole character has been changed, his back story is embellished with a WW1 experience, he gets a nice office and a secretary, the dialogue lacks the snap, the ending rings false and just everything is wrong. It isn't a badly made film, it just is an average action thriller with period hats and a bit of iffy 1930s decor. To the reviewer griping that noir is old fashioned I say watch the real thing or read the real books (much sleazier than ever made it to the screen). Like Chandler famously wrote, Marlowe has a hat, a coat and a gun. He meets idle millionaires, venal schemers, drug dealing doctors and broken people who've fallen off the bottom rung. He bends the law but stays the right side of it, shoots only one person in all his literary appearances and specialises in being hit on the head or beaten by corrupt cops. The grime of 40s and 50s L.A. is the core of the books, not some sepia nostalgia. This is a bland and misguided film that utterly misunderstands its subject.

Go into this expecting a thriller, a heist movie or anything vaguely realistic and you will hate this. What you will get is a meditation on the relationship between art, technology and survival. Defoe's art thief is trapped in a malfunctioning hi tech apartment, at the mercy of machines, unable to meet the staff of the building he can see on the monitor, slowly retreating into a feral state amidst the modernist gleam of his surroundings. His escape attempts are a series of symbolic gestures in which his battle to survive and his diminishing sanity leave their traces as symbolic works of art. His final act is to write a note telling the owners that their home, as a symbol of a cold, modern technological dystopia, perhaps needed to be destroyed. The time is perhaps 20 minutes too long. Defoe is fantastic but he struggles to bridge the gaps and things drift from the core message at some points. When this works as a social commentary it really works and when it doesn't it drags. I enjoyed it, found it interesting as a concept, Defoe is magnificent, but I probably wouldn't watch it again.