| MovieSteve

The Magic Faraway Tree

2026-10-15 by Steve

Enid Blyton has been so unfashionable for so long that it must be time for a revival. The Magic Faraway Tree could be the start of it. An old-fashioned imaginative kids adventure, it’s full of the sort of wholesome derring-do that turned Blyton into the most translated children’s author ever. The presence of Andrew Garfield, Claire Foy and Rebecca Ferguson won’t do it any harm either. Though they all play second fiddle to the kids, which is how it so often is with Blyton. In series like The Famous Five, The Secret Seven or the Malory Towers books, it’s the kids who take centre stage, while their parents remain largely offstage doing adult … Read more

Dune: Part Two

2024-05-12 by Steve

Let’s get straight to the verdict. Dune: Part Two is visually spectacular but dramatically inert, the good stuff attributable to its remarkable director Denis Villeneuve, the bad stuff down to the writer of the original novel/doorstop, Frank Herbert. This is not going to be how everyone sees it, of course, what sort of a world would that be? But if you’re one of the people who picked up Herbert’s original Dune at some point only eventually to put/fling it down again after tiring of the relentless one-thing-after-anotherness of it (see also Tolkien) the movie won’t offer much that the book didn’t, its retina-cleansing visuals to one side. It picks up right where Part … Read more

Dune

2023-05-142021-12-09 by Steve

Paul Atreides with his mother, Lady Jessica

“Dreams are messages from the deep,” it says right up at the front of Denis Villeneuve’s 2021 adaptation of Dune, possibly a nod to David Lynch, whose hazy 1984 version crashed and burned in spectacular, almost sci-fi fashion. Other nods – the design of the stillsuits and the sandworms for instance – also hark back to Lynch, a magnanimous gesture on the part of Villeneuve who, after Arrival and Bladerunner 2049, has nothing to prove in the realm of sci-fi. Lynch was being pulled in two directions when he was making his version of Frank Herbert’s novel. He wanted to make a David Lynch film, all dreamy and out there. But there was … Read more

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