ScreenCritics

It’s been a long road for fans of Marvel’s Deadpool. Originally outlined way back in the mid-2000’s, the movie ended up drifting; never really getting chance to come off the drawing-board. The recent resurgence in superhero films (and success) prompted FOX to look again at the franchise and with Ryan Reynolds pushing for it; the movie was eventually made. […]

Something that’s very interesting in our era of films is that almost all of our big stars are actually good actors. Think about it, the most well known actress is Jennifer Lawrence. She’s appeared in crowd pleasers like The Hunger Games and X-Men: First Class. Yet as she’s shown in the likes of Silver Linings Playbook, she is a […]

It’s been 15 years since the original Zoolander touched down in cinemas to mild underachievement. But a cult following developed around Ben Stiller’s character and eventually rumours a sequel flourished. The result is a film that feels out of depth and out of it’s comfort zone – with more visual flair than anything to be […]

Following the success of Cinderella, it would be two years before Disney got around to releasing another full length animated flick. This was a passion project of Walt Disney’s – a film he’d spent many years trying to get off the ground and even turned resources away from other projects to ensure it got his […]

The Hunger Games is another book-to-movie adaptation that proves Hollywood loves nothing more than to ride on the coattails of successful best sellers. But after the success of the Harry potter series, does the Hunger Games feel like the kind of film that teenagers can empathise with or is it a shameless cash grab that […]

Say ‘Peter Pan’ to most people and you’ll conjure up memories of the Disney animated film. Sadly this is not that. Pan is instead a shameless cash grab – desperate to farm an origin story where one isn’t really needed. Let’s hold our memories close and take a close look at the mess that is […]

I’ve already discussed how Straight Outta Compton was a huge success not necessarily because it was a good film but because of the timing of the film’s release and the events that were happening in America. I know this because we have a control movie, Suffragette. This was a film about an influential part of the women’s rights […]

The Revenant is one of those films that you can’t help but admire. The sheer amount of suffering it’s crew went through to tell it’s story is admirable. Directed by Alejandro G. Inarritu, winner of last years Oscar for Birdman, this film is a daring tale of survival against bleak odds. But is it worthy […]

When you look back at all the films that Walt Disney brought under his wing, none have the kind of troubled path to release that Alice in Wonderland wandered. Here was a film that Disney had dabbled in much earlier in his career when he created the short animation Alice’s Wonderland and one that he […]

Not every film can be a massive blockbuster. I get that. Like everyone else, I get sick of the world being on the line ever week in different universes, or more likely nowadays in the same universe. So I have nothing against smaller stories where not that much is on the line. Instead of panicking […]

Post World War II was an interesting time for Disney. In an attempt to save costs and drive up profits – the company shifted it’s animation style to a much cheaper production method. The result was the ability to crank out films faster than ever before but with notable lapses in quality. When I reviewed […]

There are many reasons a film can be a hit at the box office. Sometimes quality wins out and through reviews and word of mouth, people go to see it. Bad films can be hits too because the promotion manages to appeal to just enough of our base instincts to get us in the seats. […]

Bambi represents a bit of a change in tone for Disney. Up to this point it’s output was heavily based on musicals and used human characters to tell the stories it wanted. Here though was a more grounded and realistic attempt to tell a story that for the most part – relied heavily on the […]

Sometimes a film’s reputation long precedes for the wrong reasons. There’s very few movies Disney’s ever put to screen that it’s never stood by and re-released; but they do exist. The biggest among them is this 1946 tale from the deep south of America – a film that became so ired in controversy that it’ll […]

After the bomb that was Pinocchio – Disney found itself in a weird position. It still had lots of money left over from the success of Snow White yet critics still derided animated films as nothing more than bloated childrens fodder. To this Walt Disney responded not with a typical film but an avant-garde piece […]

Drugs are one of the most controversial issues in the world right now. Many believe they have a negative impact on society and want them all to illegal, and some think that the bans never work so you might as well regulate it. But while we may disagree on drugs, we all acknowledge that the […]

After the huge success of ‘Snow White’ saw massive returns for Disney, the next step in bringing animation to the movie screen was to take them to a more mature place. A few movies were banded around (The Little Mermaid among them) but in the end, Walt Disney fell onto a German folk tale about a come-to-life […]

Looking back at ‘Snow White’ it’s easy to forget just how important a film it was; both to American film and to Disney. Here was Walt Disney, a man who had already bankrupted one movie company and lost the rights to arguably his greatest  creation up to that point ‘Oswald the Lucky Rabbit’ in the […]

The Martian tows the line between character driven exercise and Hollywood popcorn muncher carefully. Starring Matt Damon,  it makes some impressive shouts and has been lauded critically to the point where it’s in for Oscar contention. But is really any good? 

‘Mission Impossible’ is a weird film to talk about. Tom Cruise’s first foray into producing – it was also the first time that he’d gone into a role like this. Taking the name of a much older TV-show, the movie attempts to bring to life the post-Soviet espionage conflict. It marks the first step in what would […]

Looking back – Season 9 had some incredibly fun episodes mixed in with some terribly bad writing decisions. It’s sad because when it got it right it all worked splendidly but there was always the threat of the paper thin plots giving way to out and out silliness. We also learned very early in the season […]

Back in 1973 Robert Zemeckis, a USC student pushed out a senior project called ‘A Field of Honor’. It wowed fellow students and caught the eye of a certain Steven Spielburg who took Zemeckis under his wing as a protégé. In 1978 Spielburg executive produced Zemeckis’s feature debut called “I Wanna Hold Your Hand”. It […]

I can imagine the conversation to greenlight ‘San Andreas’ wasn’t a particularly long one; “Take action here Dwayne Johnson, drop him into a flick where an earthquake causes all kinds of damage and watch the money happen. What’s for lunch?”. The entire thing feels like an exercise in Hollywood summer blockbusters – the question is […]

After the previous shocking developments – this weeks episode takes a huge left turn into unknown territory. Removing all the excess and enemies of the series, this episode see’s us following Capaldi’s Doctor alone. No side characters – no imminent threat to the universe. Just The Doctor and creature hell bent on killing him. Is it […]

Horror and gaming have a very hit-and-miss past together. The truth is that to make a compelling horror video game; you need patience which is something that most video games don’t afford. Luckily this pet project of ‘Supermassive Games’ and Sony goes to show that if done right – horror can very much work.

December means we’re on the home stretch for Christmas – a time for wonder and seasonal cheer. It’s also a chance for movie studios to shove out holiday movies to a festive-hungry audience. Some are good. Some are bad. Some are teeeeeeeeeeeerrible but it doesn’t matter in the end – they’re just there to make […]

Indiana Jones not only defined what an action adventure should be – he became the gold standard. Yet in his wake came a multitude of films that staggered desperately to keep up. One such film released in the shadow of Indie was 1999’s ‘The Mummy’, a film that borrowed the name of a much loved cult 1930’s classic […]

Many people have played (Or at least heard of the board game) Cluedo. It’s the one where everyone has to try and figure out who-dun-it in the living room with the lead pipe. What fewer people know is that there was actually an attempt to bring the boardgame to the big screen. A film that featured […]

Football Manager has a lot of reputation behind it and that’s part of the reason the series has continued to sell in such high volumes. At least here in the UK it’s a constant feature at the top of PC weekly sales charts. But therein lies the series biggest problem – it rarely changes itself […]

Back when Marvel released the original Iron Man – it received praise for grounding such a fantasy based concept in reality. The result was a highly competent film that managed to balance fun and gritty realism. Move forward all these years though and the films have moved on from the gritty aspect – instead relying […]

With the end of Season 9 fast approaching – it’s time for the pieces to fall into place for the inevitable big finale. But this weeks episode took an interesting detour – one that will change the direction of the show (for the better) going forward. The big question though is was this episode any […]

When talking about the ‘Fast & Furious’ franchise it’s very hard to honestly criticise. The problem is that by the seventh movie in any franchise – the people watching and the people involved clearly know what everyone involved wants and expects. Back when the Fast & Furious franchise began I can’t imagine anyone believed we’d […]

Season Nine has given Doctor Who a lot of two-parters. This is good in that it allows deep and detailed stories to be told – but also means that we don’t get the quick and snappy stories that help to underpin ‘New Who’. This week marks the Season’s first ‘one parter’ – but was it […]

Movies are a strange business. You can throw all the money and stars you want at a movie – but if it doesn’t find an audience then it’s all for nothing. But then you get those movies which come from left field and capture the mainstream attention like nothing else. When ‘Home Alone’ was released […]

Parody films are a grey area for me – if only because in most cases these films tend to rely too heavily on tropes and ideas without really addressing their own shortcomings. But way back in 1992 there was a novelty to films that parodied Hollywood sociery and that’s the niche that Universal Studio’s ‘Death […]

This season hasn’t been the best for payoffs in Doctor Who. With so many two-parters falling short of expectations – it was a genuine surprise when ‘Invasion of the Zygons’ delivered so strongly. After setting the stakes high in last weeks first parter; could this follow up manage to keep the momentum going and deliver […]

The first episode of ‘Life is Strange’ left me feeling awkwardly cold. It looked nice and tried it’s best to make me care but ultimately felt too much like a teens TV show for me to get into it. With Episode 2 ramping up on the character development and the game promising more – is […]

It was quite fitting that this episode was a Halloween episode. It was a much darker and brooding episode; raising some thought provoking ideas about identity and the morals of immigration. The question is can a Zygon story be good?

When it comes to branching story driven games; Telltale leads the way. What ‘Life is Strange promises a much more personal and intriguing tale. Throw in time travelling and teen drama and we have a different beast on our hand. The question is does Strange mean fun?

Having never really enjoyed a Borderlands game (I tried both 1 and 2 to no avail), the promise of another spin on the Borderlands universe wasn’t one I was particularly relishing. Thankfully Telltale have managed to work their magic and turn what should have been a mess into one of the strongest Telltale games yet.

After last weeks disappointing Doctor Who episode; I was eager to see how the show would address a Clara-less Doctor being paired back up with Maisie Williams. Given that the villian was rubbish and the plot lost it’s way until the final 5 minutes, could Catherine Tregenna’s script anchor a more character driven story?

Remember 50 Shades of Grey? That book all those older women rushed out to buy and salivated over? Well good news, now there’s a film of that. I’d like to say it’s good but it isn’t. I’d like to say its bad but even that feels like a stretch. Welcome to 50 Shades of Bored.

Minecraft: Story Mode is dull. It looks ok, plays fine for a Telltale game and even dips lovingly into the Minecraft ethos to invoke fans love.  But it’s dull. Oh so dull and no amount of window dressing can hide the fact that it’s a lukewarm launch pad for Telltale’s most intriguing recent project. You […]

“Bond was back” they claimed! Goldeneye had relaunched the franchise and brought the character back from the wilderness. But could the trend continue as the 90’s rolled on in ‘Tomorrow Never Dies’.

The early 90’s were a dark time for the Bond franchise. Legal wranglings and Dalton’s departure set in motion the need for change. With American actor Pierce Brosnan shuttled in to help bring in a younger audience; could he bring the series back to it’s peak?

Didn’t we already do this? A classic, well loved franchise getting a sequel so late in the day it might as well be a new franchise? Ah that was ‘Terminator Genysis’; a film so bad it managed to kill the Terminator franchise indefinitely. This time round it’s Jurassic Park’s corpse that’s getting the revival in the form […]

Terminator Genisys promises it’s the “best Terminator film since T2” – which is like saying it’s the “best character since Jar-Jar Binks”. Never has a phrase raised so many flags going into it. With a stupid name and the promise of a reboot to one of films more beloved franchises; can Genisys stick the landing […]

By the time Goldfinger arrived,  Bond was already two movies old. But times were changing and with Sean Connery reaching his peak in the role – the films needed to evolve. With more action and less spying – is Goldfinger really that good?

Space may be the final frontier but that hasn’t stopped games developers from using it as the setting for their games. With recent successes like Elite Dangerous, Kernal Space Program and the upcoming Star Citizen and No Mans Sky exploring the dark beyond has never been more popular. So when a game like ‘PlanetBase’ promises […]

Season 9 of the rebooted Doctor Who hasn’t been the most stellar of runs for the show. With ratings on the slide and the audience yearning for something more from the BBC – can “The Girl Who Died” deliver a much needed boost?