How historically accurate is Stanley Kubrick’s epic Spartacus? This time Gaz and Mel take on the Hollywood classic about the slave that took on the Roman Empire! Starring Kirk Douglas, Jean Simmons, Laurence Olivier and Charles Laughton. Join us as we discuss the real history of the slave rebellion, why the original director had to be fired, and of course that infamous Oysters and Snail scene.
Your interest in this scrappy biopic of a transactional friendship rests solely on how much interest you still hold in uncovering the faint character building moments of Donald Trump.
For anyone hellbent on defending Joker (2019)’s acclaimed existence, I propose a thought experiment: why does Todd Phillips feel the need to spend $200 million on a movie refuting the morality of the first movie if the first movie did nothing wrong?
It’s about corruptible power, the building of a city, about supernaturally controlling time. If that sounds fascinating, I can assure you the film works very hard to extinguish all excitement.
Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance is the type of viewing experience you need to recover from. It’s a ruthless, intense, pummelling journey into the body-fluid ridden depths of image based beauty standards and their effect on women.
Tim Burton’s fine career has two consistent themes: he’s a visionary and he’s often a poor judge of storytelling.
With it’s mischievous voice over, its smash cuts, its copious use of cocaine and ketamine, it’s a punkish musical biopic laced with the hedonism of being young, male, and continuously high.
If her previous work was a Mamma Mia-esque holiday romance movie, the type you need on a particularly hard day, then Iris et les hommes leans into more sexually provocative material, something closer to Pedro Almodóvar’s morally ambiguous sex-comedies.
With Alien Romulus, Fede Álvarez is entirely here to please audiences by providing them the same conventions – a corridor based monster movie with gruesome deaths, sweaty skin and plenty of heavy breathing.
Trap in many ways is representative of M. Night Shyamalan’s entire career, one showing a clear abundance of talent but also an odd deafness to the music of classic thrillers. He’s a rebel, someone who had always been an outsider to Hollywood, even when he achieved mainstream success within it.
Now with the release of the $200 million blockbuster Deadpool and Wolverine, it seems a franchise that’s supposed to make fun of the Hollywood machine has become it’s headline act. It’s an uncomfortable fit for a character that works best at the edges of the mainstream. Here Deadpool is a superhero so steeped and entrenched in the memeification of popular Hollywood culture that it devolves into a shallow pool of cameos, callbacks, and fan-service.
