Aaron Taylor-Johnson

Fuze

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Will Tranter aims a rifle

Fuze adds another little gem of a film to under-regarded director David Mackenzie’s list, joining Starred Up, Perfect Sense, Relay, Spread and Hell and High Water as unusual takes on genre, often with a heavily procedural slant. Things click, click, click into place in Mackenzie films, though often the tumblers line up in unexpected ways. Here, what looks like one sort of film quickly becomes another and then another. But things starts off in familiar territory, in the Paddington area of London, where a huge unexploded bomb has been exposed during the preparatory work for a new development. In come the bomb disposal guys, an army team led by the bluff, sweary Major … Read more

28 Years Later

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Spike and Jamie running from zombies

Danny Boyle has at least gone for it in 28 Years Later, a not always exciting but relentlessly interesting capstone on the 28 trilogy. After 28 Days and Weeks Later, logically it should have been Months, but 18 years have passed since 2007 and 18 Years Later would have broken the poetics. So Years it is. So many years, in fact, that none of the cast from the first or second film have made it this far, though Danny Boyle returns to the franchise (Juan Carlos Fresnadillo directed number two) bringing a lot of behind-the-camera talent from the 2002 original with him. That includes writer Alex Garland, who reportedly borrowed the shape of … Read more

Kraven the Hunter

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Kraven in leather jerkin

A colossally charmless superhero movie, Kraven the Hunter got pummelled by the critics and didn’t do well at the box office. But never mind all that, who should we blame? Partly an origin story, it heavily features Aaron Taylor-Johnson in the lead role, though Levi Miller plays the youthful Kraven, the Russian oligarch’s son who is mauled by a lion and acquires some of its powers after a drop of its blood mingles with his own. Or was it the spooky vial of something administered to the near-dead Sergei (aka Kraven) by Calypso Ezili (Dianna Babnicova when young, Ariana DeBose when older)? You see, even there, in the birth event of this superhero, … Read more

Nosferatu

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Ellen Hunter (Lily-Rose Depp) screaming

The films of Robert Eggers can get a bit overwrought and Nosferatu is no exception. Both The Northman and The Lighthouse (The Witch not so much) overdid it. All well and good if you subscribe to the view that too much gothic is still not enough. And you’ll be doubly re-assured by Eggers’s decision to go back to the sensational source as the inspiration for his turreted gothic assemblage. That’s not entirely true. Eggers does lean narratively and visually on FW Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu, but that itself was a blatant steal from Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula. Murnau and co hadn’t paid for the rights and hoped that changing character names would be enough … Read more

The Fall Guy

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Ryan Gosling in shades

For a while you couldn’t escape Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt banging the drum for The Fall Guy. They were everywhere, doing Herculean amounts of publicity, usually a sign that a big-bucks movie isn’t quite as good as everyone expected. Which turns out to be true. But The Fall Guy is not bad. It is entertaining enough, with diverting performances, cool action, stunts and so on. But it’s not a Tom Cruise movie, pleasing though Gosling is as the stunt guy who comes back from serious injury to save the day, get the girl and defeat the bad guy. We all know, don’t we, that it’s based on the successful TV show starring … Read more

Bullet Train

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Brad Pitt as hitman Ladybug

So you’ve decided to watch a film called Bullet Train. You know Brad Pitt is in it. You know David Leitch directed it – he co-directed John Wick and was Pitt’s stunt double in Fight Club. You have certain expectations. In fact you almost know exactly what you’re going to get – something that’s expensive and glossy, well made, with driving action and perhaps a squeeze of humour. The names Sandra Bullock and Brian Tyree Henry back up the suggestion there’ll be comedy. And there’s Michael Shannon in the credits, so maybe a bit of badassery? Want to bet there’ll also be a runaway train factored into the plot somehow? Enter Brad Pitt, … Read more

Nowhere Boy

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Aaron Taylor and Anne-Marie Duff in Nowhere Boy

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 8 December John Lennon murdered, 1980 On this day in 1980, John Lennon was murdered by Mark Chapman outside the south entrance of the Dakota building, where Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, had had an apartment since 1973. Chapman shot Lennon four times in the back and Lennon probably died immediately. He was certainly dead by the time medics at the Roosevelt Hospital saw him. Lennon and Yoko Ono had been out for the evening, mixing a track from their forthcoming album. Lennon had the final mix of the track, Walking on Thin Ice, appropriately, in his hand when he … Read more