Sam Neill

Scarygirl

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Scarygirl in person

Smart eight year olds might go a bundle on Scarygirl, an Australian animation visually targeted more at their parents, though its bounce, straightforward storytelling and bold (ok, simplistic) messaging says young. There’s a touch of Finding Nemo in the plotting. Actually it’s more Finding Dory, the sequel, the one in which little Dory goes on a big long undersea quest to find her parents. Here it’s Arkie, a strange cross between an octopus and a human, with a patch over one eye and a mouth held together at the edges with stitches, setting off to find her dad, Blister, who’s been kidnapped by the despicable Dr Maybee. Blister is a big yellow/green octopus … Read more

Jurassic World Dominion

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Group shot of the cast of Jurassic World Dominion

Going into production, the makers of Jurassic World Dominion knew they had to deal with a raft of problems that most franchises don’t have to deal with. They couldn’t change the villain – one of the key ways that long-running franchises refresh their offering. In Jurassic Park movies the bad guy remains the dinosaur no matter how many crazed megalomaniac humans are injected into the mix. They also couldn’t really change the location. This isn’t a story of a world taken over by dinosaurs but of a theme park (essentially) going wrong. James Bond gets sent to Bermuda, or Brazil, or Baluchistan, or into space orbit or beneath the waves to ring the … Read more

Possession

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Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill

Gird your loins, and probably best to stap your vitals while you’re at it, because it’s Possession, the 1981 movie showcasing one of the most remarkable displays of unhinged acting you’re ever likely to see, with Isabelle Adjani doing the frothing up, and leaving co-star Sam Neill trailing in her wake. This odd film got caught up in the video nasty debacle in the UK, where it was seen as a horror movie and got banned outright. A similarly negative outcome awaited it in the US, where over 30 minutes of footage was cut to make the film suitable for midnight movie audiences, destroying it in the process. It’s not a horror film, … Read more

The Commuter

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Liam Neeson between two train carriages

Liam Neeson. A Very Particular Set of Skills. They’re back in The Commuter, in which everyone’s favourite geri-actioner gets physical… this time on a train. This is the fourth collaboration between Neeson and director Jaume Collet-Serra, after Unknown (skills in Berlin), Non-Stop (Skills on a plane), Run All Night (Skills in New York) and now Skills on the way home from work. If it seems like there have been a lot more of these films than that, you’re probably also adding Taken (three of them) and Walk Among the Tombstones to the tally. They were directed by different people but also featured a gravelly and largely unsmiling Neeson being forced into a corner and … Read more