Eight films I'll be giving a shit about in October

In the kind of move that would be described as "ill-advised" if only someone had actually advised me to do it in the first place, I've decided to give birth to a new monthly feature. Whether I can keep it up for longer than, ooh, a month, remains to be seen, but here it is anyway: all the films released in the first third of the last quarter of 2014 for which I've got a throbbing lob-on.

LFF 2014:Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films

If there's an overriding impression with which I came away from Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films, it's that I haven't seen enough Cannon films. If there's a secondary impression with which I came away, it's that I should probably count myself lucky I haven't seen many Cannon films. Quality-vaccuums like The Apple ("the Mount Everest of bad movie musicals"), Mata Hari,

LFF 2014:'71

I visited Belfast for the first time last month. Armed with a pathetically cursory understanding of the Troubles, I took a tour around the very streets in which '71 is set, and had my eyes opened so wide I thought they might fall out. I naïvely thought everyone had made friends, shaken hands and got on with their lives after the Good Friday Agreement, but while Belfast itself is an incredibly

That's Rogertainment! Rogisode 7: The Wild Geese

The death of director Andrew V McLaglen last month prompted me to make his first collaboration with Roger Moore my next foray into the wild, weird world of Rogertainment. McLaglen and Moore would become firm friends, going on to make two more films together over the next couple of years: North Sea Hijack (1979) and The Sea Wolves (1980), but 1978's The Wild Geese would be the film for which

20,000 Days On Earth

For anyone in the mood for an imaginary day in the crazy life of Nic Cage, this could have been Christmas. Imagine someone of Cage's special brand of specialness attempting to summarise his fears, his needs, his passions and his philosophy on life in the space of a hundred-minute autobiopic; cinema would never have been the same again. Alas, accurate spelling gets in the way once more, damn

Ten educational title suggestionsfor the next Bourne film

There's a new Bourne film on the cards from Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon, which is great news if you like the Bourne films I suppose. Let's be honest, it can't be any worse than The Bourne Legacy.



Obviously the most important consideration is what they're going to call it, and I don't know about you but I've always felt the Bourne films' titles to be a bit simplistic. So I've raided my

Glad to see Robert Downey Jr's finally got his mumbling problem under control

Full trailer for The Judge here.

Richard Kiel1939-2014

"                                          "

- Jaws, The Spy Who Loved Me / Moonraker

The Guest

In an ideal world, none of us would be spending this week talking about Scottish independence, royal babies or new-fangled technowatches, because all of those things are just silly. Instead we should all be talking about The Guest, a film which is equally as silly as all those things - like, REALLY silly - but is also totally, 100% aware of it. I mean, that bag of inbred cells that's

Two Days, One Night and the BBFC's spoiler-happy guidelines

*** WARNING ***

Contains spoilers for Two Days, One Night


I went to see the Dardennes brothers' tremendous Two Days, One Night with the great unwashed of the Curzon Soho last week. It's riveting stuff: as a woman swallowing every last morsel of pride in order to beg her colleagues for her job back, Marion Cotillard makes you work as hard as she does for results.

As a foreign language

36 tweets I drafted for this morning's London Film Festival launch that I didn't get to use because the films aren't showing

Over the last week or so I've gone through my annual ritual of scouring film festival roundups from the past few months in order to predict what might be on at this year's London Film Festival. Based on this information, plus a few wild guesses about stuff that's released later this year and so hey why not, I drafted 51 tweets which I intended to deploy during this morning's LFF Press Launch in