https://www.thefilmagazine.com/animated-disney-villains-ranked/ SSP
Saw X (2023) Review
Posted in Film, Film Review, The Film Magazine
Tagged Horror, Kevin Greutert, Saw, Saw X, Shawnee Smith, Tobin Bell
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‘Steamboat Willie’ at 95 – Review
Posted in Film, Film Review, The Film Magazine
Tagged Animation, Comedy, Disney, Family Film, Steamboat Willie, Ub Iwerks, Walt Disney
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Akira Kurosawa, Toshiro Mifune: Cinema’s Greatest Collaborations
Posted in Film, Film Feature, The Film Magazine
Tagged Akira Kurosawa, Stray Dog, The Bad Sleep Well, Throne of Blood, Toshirô Mifune, World Cinema, Yojimbo
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Review in Brief: Oppenheimer (2023)
Of all Nolan’s films, OPPENHEIMER is the sexy one?! A 3 hour, talky, philosophical character drama isn’t most people’s idea of a must-see crowd-pleaser, but it’s making waves. The time taken and the deliberate pacing, paired with stylistic signifiers of differing points of view and warped takes on reality makes this one hell of an intensive and fascinating character study. In a typically Nolan, non-chronological fashion, we follow J Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) the “Father of the Atom Bomb”, his race against time during WWII to deliver the weapon and his fall from grace in the decade that followed. Murphy’s transcendent central performance threatens to overwhelm the rest of this talented ensemble (Robert Downey Jr and Matt Damon still stand out) but everyone gets at least one showstopping moment. What will stay with you the most beyond individual wondrous and terrifying images is the unrelenting wall of sound, the encroaching sound of guilt and our doom. SSP
Posted in Film, Film Review, Review in Brief
Tagged Christopher Nolan, Cillian Murphy, Drama, Historical Drama, Oppenheimer, Robert Downey Jr, Thriller
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Review in Brief: Mission Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023)
As impressive as the bike jump off a cliff is, that’s only the appetiser in a particularly audacious action finale. In the particularly relevant, perhaps penultimate Mission: Impossible, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and his IMF team battle an AI that has gained self-awareness and is sewing chaos and the threat of nuclear war across the world. DEAD RECKONING PART ONE is touching on three hours but somehow doesn’t feel like it. Famously, since Christopher McQuarrie took over the reigns of the franchise, ideas for action scenes are thought up first and the script weaved between them, so the final product is miraculously coherent considering. The scale and stakes have never been higher and Cruise and the cast, particularly new addition Hayley Atwell, couldn’t be more game for whatever madness is thrown at them. What on earth will they come up with for Part Two? SSP
Peter Weir Films Ranked
Posted in Film, Film Feature, The Film Magazine
Tagged Dead Poets Society, Fearless, Gallipoli, Green Card, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, Peter Weir, Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Cars That Ate Paris, The Last Wave, The Mosquito Coast, The Truman Show, The Way Back, The Year of Living Dangerously, Witness
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‘Blade’ at 25 – Review
Posted in Film, Film Review, The Film Magazine
Tagged Blade, Horror, Stephen Dorff, Stephen Norrington, Superhero Movie, Wesley Snipes
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Review in Brief: Return to Seoul (2022/23)
This year has seen two very different films exploring different sides of the South Korean adoption industry, first Kore-ada’s BROKER and now RETURN TO SEOUL. Davy Chou’s film throws up questions of mismatched culture and heritage as the Korean-born, French-raised Freddie (Park Ji-min in an astonishing debut) returns on a whim to the country where her parents gave her away 25 years earlier and attempts to track them down with the help of her endlessly patient friend Tena (Guka Han, who imbues the simple question “why are you so sad?” with the rawest of emotion). We subsequently drop in on the sometimes abrasive but always compelling Freddie and the ups and downs of her life over the next decade. After the initial strained meeting with Freddie’s biological father (Oh Kwang-rok), the film constantly wrong-foots you and goes in some unexpected directions but is always in service of its contradictory, complicated lead character. SSP
Posted in Film, Film Review, Review in Brief
Tagged Davy Chou, Drama, Guka Han, Oh Kwang-rok, Park Ji-min, World Cinema
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SSP Thinks Film 