No Way, Jose

Spider-Man: No Way Home is great fun, surprisingly touching in places, and even a bit sad, but in a good way. It makes less and less sense the more you think about it, but gets by on momentum and a big heap of charm. It's probably the best of the MCU-Holland series, and overall is the fourth best Spider-Man film, but Into the Spider-Verse remains king of the arachnids.

Quickie Film Reviews: Dragon Wars (2007)

Godzilla plus Dragonball Z plus Lord of the Rings plus the crappy Transformers, not as good as the first three but better than the latter.

Quickie Film Reviews: Star Trek Into Darkness (2013)

Someone should really stop Damon Lindelof from ruining promising films with his cack-handed scripts.

Quickie Film Reviews: Ponyo (2008)

Splash meets The Fifth Element, with a little bit of Coccoon. Beautiful -- and defiantly non-3D non-CGI -- animation, and perhaps the most pleasant post-apocalyptic film I've ever seen.

Quickie Film Reviews: Red Cliff (2008)

John Woo finally remembers how to make a decent film, in doing so upstaging Peter Jackson's The Two Towers and The Return of the King, but also remembering to include the requisite fight-while-holding-a-baby, Mexican standoff, and unnecessary flurry of white doves.

Quickie Film Reviews: Night of the Comet (1984)

It's The Omega Man meets Clueless and it's very, very 80's. It's not as good as I remember it being when I was a child, but it's much better than it should be.

Quickie Film Reviews: Franklyn (2008)

Love Actually + The Matrix + steampunk = Why didn't more people see this film?

Quickie Film Reviews: The Black Swan (1942)

A bit slow to properly buckle the swash, but it has good performances, a great script, and a big fat Welshman who says "look you" a lot, none of which feature in the 2010 film of a similar name.

Quickie Film Reviews: Black Swan (2010)

Darren Aronofsky's Teen Wolf remake lacks the subtlety of the original.

Quickie Film Reviews: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010)

Quickie Film Reviews: Inception (2010)

Christopher Nolan would like you to know that he liked Dark City just as much, if not more than the Wachowskis did.

Christopher Nolan would also like you to know that he likes On Her Majesty's Secret Service best of all the Bond films.

Christopher Nolan needs a script editor.

Quickie Film Reviews: Star Trek (2009)

The only thing I liked about Cloverfield was the credits music, so it was nice to hear it again. For two hours. Apparently, Trek is the future of Alias. He's not Shatner, but he'll do. Murdering a bunch of helpless men is not a heroic finale. It was much better than I thought it would be.

Quickie Film Reviews: Casshern (2004)

Robocop + Hellboy II + Holocaust analogy + Christ metaphor = Utterly mental and probably not much good. 6/10.

Brainsplurge reviews Casino Royale

The original was better.

Quickie Film Reviews: R-Point

Film Four showed Korean spookfest R-Point last night (or early this morning). It's quite clearly a post-Ringu film in terms of style, right down to a Sadako clone wandering about, although the narrative, with talk of old burial grounds and curses, is a bit more traditional than the post-Hiroshima psychic teenager shenanigans of the Japanese film.

It's also something of a disappointment, but on the plus side, it's only such a let down because the opening two-thirds of the film are exceptionally well done, with a couple of nicely-paced shocks and some clever and quite subtle moments (well, I saw them as subtle, but I suppose they might seem obvious if one were to take certain portions of the script literally). Sadly, the creators seem to have run out of ideas by the end of the film (aside from one bit dealing with the fate of the lead character, which again seemed subtle and somewhat heartbreaking to me, but might in fact have been patently obvious), resorting instead to erratic storytelling and bursts of random violence. The "rules" of the curse are also somewhat inconsistent, particularly in comparison to the stark simplicity of something like the aforementioned Ringu; I'm still not sure why certain stuff does and doesn't happen to certain characters. Similarly, fairly important chunks of the script seem to be missing, like what exactly Sergeant Jing is up to; I get the feeling that either the original script was a bit shaky, or more likely the English translation is somewhat haphazard.

Still, the first hour or so made the film highly entertaining, even if the climax wasn't up to the same standard. R-Point isn't as good an entry in the "squaddies against the paranormal" genre as either Predator or Dog Soldiers (where's that sequel, Pertwee?), but it's definitely worth a look, and it's better than The Keep, or that one with the haunted submarine that no one watched.