Ebon Moss-Bachrach

The Fantastic Four: First Steps

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The Thing, Mr Fantastic, Invisible Woman and the Human Torch

The Fantastic Four: First Steps. The title is a joke, a reference to Marvel history and also an announcement – this, fanfare please, is the opening film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s glorious Phase Six. The joke. The Fantastic Four has taken many first steps before. It’s the failed-to-launch superhero franchise par excellence, with three damp squibs – two with Ioan Gruffudd and Jessica Alba and one with Miles Teller and Kate Mara, not forgetting assorted unremarkable FF walk-ons in other MCU movies. “Damp” may be overdoing it, but those three movies did not sweep all before them, let’s say. And then there was Roger Corman’s run at the material, with a movie … Read more

Sharp Stick

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Kristine Froseth and Sarah Jo

Like a lot of Lena Dunham’s work, Sharp Stick is a quirky dramedy set among the delusional and self-obsessed. With its strong autobiographical element it sits neatly alongside her early web series Delusional Downtown Divas (which kind of says it all), her breakthrough movie Tiny Furniture, and her TV show Girls. Dunham appears in it, and also produces, writes and directs, but it all hangs on one-time model and star of Netflix’s The Society Kristine Froseth, as a spectacularly naive woman who lives at home with her jaded mother and influencer sister and then gets into sex all of a sudden, aged 26, after seducing the father of the kid she babysits. Dunham … Read more