Radio Times
type: channel
link: https://www.radiotimes.com
date: 2025-11-11T17:00:16.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: Now You See Me: Now You Don't review – A disposable but fitfully fun reunion
items: The Life of Chuck review: Tom Hiddleston charms in this entertaining, imaginative and non-horror Stephen King adaptation
items: The Life of Chuck review: Stephen King adaptation is entertaining, imaginative and affirmative
items: Here review: Tom Hanks and Robin Wright can't save this heavy-handed Forrest Gump reunion
items: We Live in Time review: Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield thrive in thoughtful but overcooked weepie
items: Mufasa: The Lion King review – Disney's CG prequel is flawed but fitfully powerful
items: Mufasa: The Lion King review – A flawed but fitfully powerful CG prequel
items: That Christmas review: Richard Curtis's animation is twee but with a winning formula
items: Transformers One review: Animated prequel is earnestly enjoyable
items: Twisters review: Serviceable summer spectacle won't blow you away
items: IF review: Like a live-action Pixar film with less finesse
items: Saw X review: Drawn out in-between-quel has no sense of mystery
items: Transformers: Rise of the Beasts review – heavy going and exhausting
items: John Wick: Chapter 4 review – Excess is not a problem
items: Spirited review: Ryan Reynolds's unruly but enjoyable yuletide romp
items: Wendell & Wild review: Funny, frisky and fully imagined
items: The School for Good and Evil review: A ponderous young-adult fantasy
items: Hocus Pocus 2 review: Something nostalgic this way comes

Now You See Me: Now You Don't review – A disposable but fitfully fun reunion
type: item
date: 2025-11-11T17:00:16.000Z
creator: Kevin Harley
subject: Movies
subject: Review
description: The script for this threequel is rarely as clever as it thinks it is and hardly ever as fresh as it should be.
encoded: Combining legacy characters with a new trio of younger illusionists, the third film in this action-comedy series is a busily disposable – if fitfully fun – combination of reunion gig and new-generation franchise spruce-up. Director Ruben Fleischer (Venom, Uncharted) replaces predecessors Louis Leterrier and Jon M Chu, stepping in to juggle the expected ingredients of a tangled heist, some tricksy set pieces, a couple of crowd-pleasing cameos and splashes of globe-trotting glitz. Yet as the crowded cast grapple with the script’s patchy supplies of sparkle and finesse, it can be hard to care which way the plot’s cards end up landing. The opening piles deceit on deceit with a show seemingly involving the returning Four Horsemen, star magicians whose ranks number cocky frontman J Dallas Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), hypnotist Merritt (Woody Harrelson), escapologist Henley (Isla Fisher) and card-sharp Jack (Dave Franco), reunited after almost 10 years away. A rug-pulling segue then introduces a fresh-faced gang of magicians, namely Bosco Leroy (Dominic Sessa), June (Ariana Greenblatt) and Charlie (Justice Smith). When Atlas infiltrates their secret hideout to reprimand them for imitating his crew, he also recruits them. Their mission, should they choose, etc? To help engineer a diamond heist and take down a crime syndicate fronted by Veronika Vanderberg (Rosamund Pike), a woman whose callous activities, we’re told, “make the world’s worst people possible". Read more: Dragonfly review: Brenda Blethyn is at her very best in frequently heartbreaking film Die My Love review: Jennifer Lawrence is superb in this absorbing and quietly devastating drama The film’s prologue tries to big up the Horsemen’s comeback to a degree that might seem excessive even if Elvis were resurrected. While it’s hard to share the excitement at their return after the shallow romp of 2016’s Now You See Me 2, a nifty on-screen switcheroo at least revitalises the franchise’s mild pleasures: watching charming…

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The Life of Chuck review: Tom Hiddleston charms in this entertaining, imaginative and non-horror Stephen King adaptation
type: item
creator: Kevin Harley
subject: App
subject: App features
description: Midnight Mass director Mike Flanagan makes King's novella into a real crowd-pleaser – even if schmaltz occasionally overrides substance
encoded: ★★★★☆ The Life of Chuck is in cinemas now. Add it to your watchlist Like Frank Darabont before him, Mike Flanagan is becoming his generation’s foremost film-maker-as-fan of Stephen King. Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep and Gerald’s Game are faithful – perhaps to a fault – takes on the writer’s novels, channelling King’s feel for emotion, dialogue, suspense and shock alongside fitful echoes of his lapses into folksy woolliness. Even Flanagan’s Midnight Mass, which was not a King title, summoned the spirit of King’s Salem’s Lot more keenly than the 2022 movie. Flanagan extends this connection into a stirring riff on one of King’s non-horror novellas in The Life of Chuck, a crowd-pleaser in the heart-tickling vein – if not quite class – of Darabont’s The Shawshank Redemption. Telling the story of a man’s life in reverse across three acts, the result is prone to sentiment and big swings that aim wide. But it also shares King’s sometimes generous empathy for character, flair for dialogue and rarely noted fascination with dancing. Even if the result can trip over its hoofing feet, it’s not for want of sincere engagement with King’s tale. In the opening act (or closing, depending on your viewpoint), Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Marty, a teacher trying to interest his class in Walt Whitman through the world’s dying days. As Marty reconnects with his ex (Karen Gillan) one last time, a mystery emerges: why does he keep seeing signs thanking a stranger named Chuck Krantz for "39 great years"? We find out more in act two, where Chuck emerges as an accountant (Tom Hiddleston) in his late 30s. Chuck is facing tough times. But in the meantime he makes a spontaneous, joyful dance connection with a heart-broken woman to a street busker’s vigorous drumbeat. Finally, in act three, we see how Chuck grew up in a possibly haunted house with his grandparents and learnt what his dancing feet were for. These synopses only skate over the surface of the film, which also cogitates lightly on climate change,…

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The Life of Chuck review: Stephen King adaptation is entertaining, imaginative and affirmative
type: item
date: 2025-08-18T05:00:44.000Z
creator: Kevin Harley
subject: Movies
subject: Review
description: The latest adaptation by Mike Flanagan is a real crowd-pleaser – even if schmaltz occasionally overrides substance.
encoded: Like Frank Darabont before him, Mike Flanagan is becoming his generation’s foremost film-maker-as-fan of Stephen King. Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep and Gerald’s Game are faithful – perhaps to a fault – takes on the writer’s novels, channelling King’s feel for emotion, dialogue, suspense and shock alongside fitful echoes of his lapses into folksy woolliness. Even Flanagan’s Midnight Mass, which was not a King title, summoned the spirit of King’s Salem’s Lot more keenly than the 2022 movie. Flanagan extends this connection into a stirring riff on one of King’s non-horror novellas in The Life of Chuck, a crowd-pleaser in the heart-tickling vein – if not quite class – of Darabont’s The Shawshank Redemption. Telling the story of a man’s life in reverse across three acts, the result is prone to sentiment and big swings that aim wide. But it also shares King’s sometimes generous empathy for character, flair for dialogue and rarely noted fascination with dancing. Even if the result can trip over its hoofing feet, it’s not for want of sincere engagement with King’s tale. In the opening act (or closing, depending on your viewpoint), Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Marty, a teacher trying to interest his class in Walt Whitman through the world’s dying days. As Marty reconnects with his ex (Karen Gillan) one last time, a mystery emerges: why does he keep seeing signs thanking a stranger named Chuck Krantz for "39 great years"? We find out more in act two, where Chuck emerges as an accountant (Tom Hiddleston) in his late 30s. Chuck is facing tough times. But in the meantime he makes a spontaneous, joyful dance connection with a heart-broken woman to a street busker’s vigorous drumbeat. Finally, in act three, we see how Chuck grew up in a possibly haunted house with his grandparents and learnt what his dancing feet were for. These synopses only skate over the surface of the film, which also cogitates lightly on climate change, cosmic forces, time, choices, human connections, inner universes an…

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Here review: Tom Hanks and Robin Wright can't save this heavy-handed Forrest Gump reunion
type: item
creator: Kevin Harley
subject: App
subject: App features
description: Director Robert Zemeckis's ambitious domestic drama on the passage of time is a syrupy affair hampered by distracting de-aging technology.
encoded: ★★☆☆☆ Here is in cinemas now. Add it to your watchlist With its opening segue from dinosaurs to the Ice Age to Indigenous people, Here signals itself as a kind of grand statement on time’s passage for director Robert Zemeckis. A workable alternative title could have been We Live in Time, were it not taken. Although the film soon turns into a multi-generational domestic drama, history and change sit high on its thematic agenda, which would suggest bracing ambition if the results didn’t so often land with the deadening thud of a dinosaur’s stomp. View oEmbed on the source website Adapting Richard McGuire’s graphic novel, Zemeckis reteams here with his Forrest Gump writer (Eric Roth) and stars, Tom Hanks and Robin Wright. Echoing Gump, Zemeckis uses experimental techniques and cutting-edge technology, notably the de-aging effects that make actors’ faces glisten so oddly. The camera mostly assumes one perspective, fixed on the land a house was built on in the early 20th century and then on the living room of that house over a century or so. As families pass through, the idea is that so does all of life, love and death, accompanied by some wincingly on-the-nose song choices about the same. The characters range from Benjamin Franklin to an early-20th-century woman who berates her husband for his fixation on flying, convinced it will kill him. Another man invents the La-Z-Boy armchair, while a modern-day black family bring a robot vacuum to the home. But the primary focus falls on the family of a Second World War veteran (Paul Bettany) and his wife (Kelly Reilly), whose children include Richard (Tom Hanks), a would-be artist who marries his high-school sweetheart Margaret (Robin Wright). As Margaret becomes pregnant, Richard stops painting and becomes the family provider, setting up a decades-long tale of dreams deferred that unfolds while history happens around them. If the single-room perspective feels stagey, Zemeckis attempts to remedy the issue with an initially seduc…

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We Live in Time review: Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield thrive in thoughtful but overcooked weepie
type: item
creator: Kevin Harley
subject: App
subject: App features
description: This romantic melodrama from Brooklyn director John Crowley boasts a strong pair of leads, but isn't without contrivances.
encoded: ★★★☆☆ We Live in Time is in cinemas from New Year's Day. Add it to your watchlist A cast you want to spend time can be the saving grace of many a flawed romantic melodrama. While Brooklyn director John Crowley’s seventh feature is a considered and classy tear-jerker, it also arrives laden with overcooked metaphors (eggs are on the menu) and scrambled plot convolutions. But these excesses serve at least one welcome purpose: they make you appreciate how good Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield are in the lead roles. View oEmbed on the source website Pugh plays Almut and Andrew plays Tobias, a couple whose partnership is fraught with coincidences and kitchen-based contrasts. She’s a high-grade chef who knows the best way to crack an egg; he knows his way around a cereal box, presumably, since he works for Weetabix. They fall in love, then fall out before reconnecting and debating whether to have a child and get married. But a crisis unfolds when Almut is diagnosed and treated for ovarian cancer, which reoccurs after the couple have a daughter. Scripted by playwright and screenwriter Nick Payne, this relatively straightforward set-up becomes more complicated in action. The story unfurls in non-chronological order, so that viewers need to figure out by visual cues where the narrative is in Almut and Tobias’s journey at any given time. Under Crowley’s elegant direction, Almut’s hair is one reliable steer and Tobias’s injuries are another, given the nature of the film’s meet-cute: a collision that occurs as he pops out of a hotel room in his dressing gown to buy pens and gets hit by a car. Guess who’s driving. This pile-up of circumstances typifies a tendency towards contrivance in Payne’s script. The issue extends to the dialogue, which ranges from Tobias’s faltering, Richard Curtis-esque declaration of love to a fall-out in which his syntax comes out mangled. When he tells Almut that their conflict “a lot, hurt,” it’s hard not to wonder why Payne’s insistence on putting th…

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Mufasa: The Lion King review – Disney's CG prequel is flawed but fitfully powerful
type: item
creator: Kevin Harley
subject: App
subject: App features
description: Moonlight director Barry Jenkins adds currents of personality and style, but there's still a weird cognitive disconnect seeing photoreal big cats talking.
encoded: ★★★☆☆ Mufasa: The Lion King is in cinemas from Friday 20 December. Add it to your watchlist Beloved villains' origin stories are largely best left alone, or at least ambiguous. While Heath Ledger’s Joker mocked the idea of origins in The Dark Knight, Darth Vader might have been better off without his surly teenage years. With many such tales, the sense of an imposing figure being reduced to a mechanical box-ticking exercise lingers. With that in mind, it’s impressive that director Barry Jenkins (Moonlight) and writer Jeff Nathanson make such an absorbing job of this flawed but fitfully powerful CG prequel to Jon Favreau’s The Lion King makeover. In the age of the backstory, the film never fully shakes from its fur a sense that Scar’s villainy and Mufasa’s stature are diminished by bullet-point psychologies. But at least Jenkins gives his tale of brotherhood and betrayal currents of personality and style, aided by some springy songs from Lin-Manuel Miranda that extend the original’s legacy breezily. View oEmbed on the source website The story introduces the idea of legacies — "He lives in you," indeed — swiftly. A framing device involves Simba (voiced by Donald Glover) and Nala’s (Beyoncé Knowles) daughter Kiara (Blue Ivy Carter) hearing the tale of Mufasa (Aaron Pierre) and Scar-to-be Taka (Kelvin Harrison Jr) from sagely mandrill Rafiki (John Kani). During a flood, a young Mufasa is swept from home, orphaned and saved by fellow cub Taka. The two become brothers, thick as thieves as they grow and dream of finding a new home. But soon, a shared love for lioness Sarabi (Tiffany Boone) and a shared desire to be king — coupled with the machinations of embittered white "outsider" tiger Kiros (Mads Mikkelsen) will drive a wedge between them. While this premise shares the timeless sweep of the original Lion King, Jenkins anchors it in visual detail. There’s still no avoiding the weird cognitive disconnect of seeing photoreal big cats talking, but these animals are more exp…

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Mufasa: The Lion King review – A flawed but fitfully powerful CG prequel
type: item
date: 2024-12-17T17:00:15.000Z
creator: Kevin Harley
subject: Movies
subject: Review
description: Moonlight director Barry Jenkins adds currents of personality and style, but there's still a weird cognitive disconnect seeing photoreal big cats talking.
encoded: Iconic villains' origin stories are largely best left alone, or at least ambiguous. While Heath Ledger’s Joker mocked the idea of origins in The Dark Knight, Darth Vader might have been better off without his surly teenage years. With many such tales, the sense of an imposing figure being reduced to a mechanical box-ticking exercise lingers. With that in mind, it’s impressive that director Barry Jenkins (Moonlight) and writer Jeff Nathanson make such an absorbing job of this flawed but fitfully powerful CG prequel to Jon Favreau’s The Lion King makeover. In the age of the backstory, the film never fully shakes from its fur a sense that Scar’s villainy and Mufasa’s stature are diminished by bullet-point psychologies. But at least Jenkins gives his tale of brotherhood and betrayal currents of personality and style, aided by some springy songs from Lin-Manuel Miranda that extend the original’s legacy breezily. The story introduces the idea of legacies – "He lives in you," indeed – swiftly. A framing device involves Simba (voiced by Donald Glover) and Nala’s (Beyoncé Knowles) daughter Kiara (Blue Ivy Carter) hearing the tale of Mufasa (Aaron Pierre) and Scar-to-be Taka (Kelvin Harrison Jr) from sagely mandrill Rafiki (John Kani). During a flood, a young Mufasa is swept from home, orphaned and saved by fellow cub Taka. The two become brothers, thick as thieves as they grow and dream of finding a new home. But soon, a shared love for lioness Sarabi (Tiffany Boone) and a shared desire to be king – coupled with the machinations of embittered white "outsider" tiger Kiros (Mads Mikkelsen) will drive a wedge between them. While this premise shares the timeless sweep of the original Lion King, Jenkins anchors it in visual detail. There’s still no avoiding the weird cognitive disconnect of seeing photoreal big cats talking, but these animals are more expressive than Favreau’s. Aided by wingman cinematographer James Laxton, Jenkins ensures you notice it by transposing his live-ac…

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That Christmas review: Richard Curtis's animation is twee but with a winning formula
type: item
creator: Kevin Harley
subject: App
subject: App features
description: The Love Actually writer's adaptation of three children’s Christmas books is formulaic but gentle and heart-warming
encoded: ★★★☆☆ That Christmas is on Netflix from 4 December. Add it to your watchlist. Despite its strained efforts to bring so many of its characters together, Richard Curtis’s Love Actually has proven more divisive than boiled Brussels sprouts in its time as a Christmas staple. Revisiting seasonal fare as a writer (alongside Peter Souter) after 2023’s dreary Genie, Curtis evokes a spirit of festive unity more surely with British studio Locksmith Animation’s adaptation of his three children’s Christmas books. Twee but winning, the heart-warming result is cooked to Curtis formula but laced with just the right doses of mirth, merriment and melancholy. View oEmbed on the source website Working with one reindeer (voiced by Guz Khan) after a bout of illness, Brian Cox’s stressed Santa zooms in on the quaint English seaside town of Wellington-on-Sea. Here, he discovers children, tweens and grown-ups in a “blizzard of bother”. Hapless new kid in town Danny (Jack Wisniewski) wrestles with a blushing crush on young Sam (Zazie Hayhurst) and family crises — his parents are divorced, his mum (Jodie Whittaker) works long hours as a nurse, and his dad may not be home for Christmas. For her part, Sam struggles to temper the misbehaviour of twin Charlie (Sienna Sayer), lest Charlie ends up on Santa’s naughty list. And young Bernadette (India Brown) is tasked with taking charge of her siblings and other kids when their parents become stranded while travelling in heavy weather. That Bernadette takes advantage of the problem to reinvent the family Christmas is typical of a film that toasts kids’ imaginations, resilience and resourcefulness. As with Love Actually, the script treats Christmas as “an emotional magnifying glass”, following multiple characters as they converge, disconnect, run riot and reunite. Where it differs from that 2003 hit is in Curtis’s abandonment of certain registers that struck sour or queasy notes. That Christmas is clearly his work — bumbling romantic Danny is just a …

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Transformers One review: Animated prequel is earnestly enjoyable
type: item
date: 2024-10-01T13:30:37.000Z
creator: Kevin Harley
subject: Movies
subject: Review
description: It’s all a little predictable, but it's a pleasant surprise to see a Transformers film where you can tell which hunk of metal is lamping which.
encoded: "It’s time to show ’em we are more than meets the eye," declares a robot in this animated Transformers prequel. Even working with the well-worn materials of a rusty screen saga – 2018’s franchise high Bumblebee aside – and an origin story, director Josh Cooley manages to show just that with his take on Hasbro’s metamorphosing metal-heads. Against the odds, Cooley has crafted one of the most earnestly enjoyable toy-based animations you didn’t ask for since his last one, Toy Story 4. His methodology is nicely simple: strip the ’bots of their main attributes and rebuild them again. With the action set on the planet Cybertron, the focus alights on familiar characters when they were lowly workers who can’t even transform due to the absence of a crucial "T-cog". All they do is mine Energon, an energy source vital to Cybertron but in short supply. Essentially slave labour, these robots bring to mind an unexpected cross between Antz and Aliens' marines, complete with locker-room banter. Their number includes one Orion Pax (voiced by Chris Hemsworth) and his pal D-16 (Brian Tyree Henry), who tends to get Pax out of trouble when required, which is often. Pax has dreams of greatness and D-16 is more cautious, and their contrasts will set these friends on a path to conflict that Transformers fans know well. Meanwhile, this version of Cybertron is lorded over by Sentinel Prime (Jon Hamm), a robot with a pristine paint job. He’s also the last surviving Prime, after the others were wiped out by an alien species. Into this class-divided climate comes Pax, who sets out to restore the flow of Energon to Cybertron by attempting to locate a vital artefact on the planet’s surface. Aided by D-16, workplace supervisor Elita-1 (Scarlett Johansson) and joshing fellow miner B-127 (Keegan-Michael Key), Pax instead uncovers a conspiracy involving off-world oppressors, political corruption and missing T-cogs. If the prospect of a Transformers film about oppressed workers revolting sounds unlike…

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Twisters review: Serviceable summer spectacle won't blow you away
type: item
date: 2024-07-16T15:40:56.000Z
creator: Kevin Harley
subject: Movies
subject: Review
description: The set pieces often impress but any hints of romance, drama and humour are too often lost in the eye of the storm.
encoded: Towards the end of this follow-up to director Jan de Bont’s 1996 hit, a writer reporting on storm-chasers wonders what kind of story he should be telling. The question is a pointed one, because Twisters never quite resolves what angle it wants to take. Elemental romance or meteorological thriller? Disaster movie or lament for real-world losses? Sequel or reboot? Though the pluralised title seems to augur maximalist thrills – Aliens being the obvious precedent – director Lee Isaac Chung’s serviceable summer spectacle frustrates because it never fully amplifies its lines of attack. As films from Cliffhanger to Twister itself tend to, it begins with trauma. Student Kate Cooper (Daisy Edgar-Jones) leads a ragtag team on an experiment in Oklahoma to battle a tornado, firing nappy material up into the funnel to absorb moisture and thus disperse the cloud. But the mission goes wrong, and three of her friends die in the diaper-based dust-up. Five years on, fellow survivor Javi (Anthony Ramos) approaches Kate in her calmer New York job. Having developed a means to measure twisters’ behaviour, he needs her to help determine their paths. When Kate returns to Oklahoma with Javi, they clash with a rootin’-tootin’ posse of reckless tornado-chasers, fronted by YouTube stud Tyler Owens (Glen Powell). Might Kate and Tyler bond as he reveals hidden qualities? They might, indeed, though this low-sparks connection typifies the underfed writing in Mark L Smith’s script. It’s equally typical that, after five years away from “chasing”, Kate takes all of five minutes to forget her losses and join Javi’s operation. Lacking sparkle and character tension, the on-screen drama feels oddly muted. View oEmbed on the source website The fun starts as Tornado Alley’s twisters rear up and the chasers get to work, giving Chung licence to deliver the expected sound and fury. His previous film, Minari (2020), offered a gentle strain of rustic Americana before climaxing in a fierce conflagration. Chung c…

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IF review: Like a live-action Pixar film with less finesse
type: item
date: 2024-05-15T13:00:02.000Z
creator: Kevin Harley
subject: Movies
subject: Review
description: John Krasinski's new film is loosely-plotted and derivative but occasionally playful and charming.
encoded: John Krasinski carved out a reputation as an emotionally assured horror director with the first two A Quiet Place films, tense and ingenious creature features about a traumatised family. Aimed at younger audiences, his follow-up is a more benevolent but baggier riff on themes of familial strife. Loosely-plotted and derivative but occasionally playful and charming, IF explores loss and recovery through a story about cutesy creatures who just want to hug their human co-stars, not disembowel them. Cailey Fleming plays Bea, a 12-year-old girl whose mother died of cancer and whose father (Krasinski) faces a heart operation. As Bea moves in with her grandma (Fiona Shaw) in New York, the girl develops the ability to see fantastical 'IFs' (imaginary friends) in the vicinity. Dapper neighbour Cal (Ryan Reynolds) shares her newfound skill, and Bea joins him to help reunite this menagerie of sweet creatures with the childhood pals who grew up and forgot them. As echoes of Pixar’s Up, Monsters Inc and Toy Story mount, Krasinski seems intent on making a live-action Pixar film, right down to composer Michael Giacchino’s score. The faint influence of Studio Ghibli’s My Neighbour Totoro further registers Krasinski’s taste, though it’s hard to shake the sense that much of IF has been done before, and with more finesse. Even if Krasinski shares Pixar’s emotional articulacy, IF lacks the animation studio’s precision-honed feel for plot and comedy. The first half meanders, lacking momentum and stakes. Laughs are scarce, and any sense of focus slowly winds up diluted by the diffuse comic interactions between Bea, Cal and the IFs. Read more: Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes review: Decent thrills and spectacular action The Idea of You review: Anne Hathaway is a delight in enjoyable romcom When Bea enters the world of the IFs beneath Coney Island, some inventive fun is had as the environment mutates according to her imaginative whims. The creatures are cutely quirky, albeit overly remini…

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Saw X review: Drawn out in-between-quel has no sense of mystery
type: item
date: 2023-09-28T03:00:00.000Z
creator: Kevin Harley
subject: Movies
subject: Review
description: The 10th entry in the horror franchise puts Tobin Bell's Jigsaw back at centre stage – but has little to offer besides gory fan service.
encoded: Released in 2021, Spiral: From the Book of Saw was a bold but flawed bid to make a Saw movie without – even in flashbacks - Tobin Bell as original Jigsaw killer John Kramer. Duly, the disappointing box office returns for that ninth entry in the horror series provoked the inevitable response for the 10th outing in the series. Neither on-screen death nor franchise overkill can keep a horror icon down, so Kramer returns for Saw VI and Saw 3D director Kevin Greutert’s Saw X, set in the saga’s timeline between Saw and Saw II. The calm pleasures of Bell’s unnervingly purposeful performance aside, that sense of inevitability is the main problem with this run around John’s old block of wicked games, pseudo-moral tests and medieval death traps. After Saw sequels, prequels, near-parodies and spin-offs, the main sell here is a back-to-basics approach. Greutert delivers all the gushing gore and series Easter eggs fans might expect, with a caveat. He’s so busy pleasing the fanbase that he neglects another vital piece of the franchise puzzle: the sense of mystery that helped lift the best Saws above ‘torture porn’ clichés. Saw X starts with a declaration of intent, closing in on Kramer’s face as he reckons with a diagnosis of terminal cancer. He expects to live for a year, at best, until a seemingly recovered cancer patient informs Kramer of a radical new cure. Signed up, Kramer visits a secret location in Mexico and pays for treatment. But when he realises he has been scammed, he contacts his protégé Amanda (Shawnee Smith) and plots revenge – which, in his troubling thinking, involves devising elaborate torments and tests to "reawaken" his victims to an awareness of life’s value. With Kramer situated as the protagonist, Saw X partly plays into the emotional impact of his confrontation with mortality. Conversely, the opening stretch also peddles a winning line in gallows humour. "I," says Kramer, pausing for comic-dramatic effect as faux-surgeon Cecilia Pederson (Synnøve Macody L…

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Transformers: Rise of the Beasts review – heavy going and exhausting
type: item
date: 2023-06-08T10:59:08.000Z
creator: Kevin Harley
subject: Movies
subject: Sci-fi
subject: Comment
subject: Review
description: After showing signs of evolution, the Hasbro toys franchise regresses again in its seventh offering.
encoded: When director Michael Bay’s joylessly super-sized five-film run ended with the deadening Transformers: the Last Knight in 2017, director Travis Knight offered a charming course corrective with his sweetly nostalgic Bumblebee (2018). In a seeming attempt to remedy the relative under-performance of ’Bee at the box office, director Steven Caple Jr (Creed II) attempts a rapprochement between his predecessors’ extremes, pairing winning cast work and soundtrack choices with action excesses and apocalyptic stakes. But even the efforts of five screenwriters can’t prevent the balance from tilting towards Bay’s maximalism as the metal-on-metal aggro mounts. The prehistoric prologue sets the heavy going tone, zeroing in on an ape Transformer with buzz-cut hair and another who resembles a falcon. Why extra-terrestrial robots would disguise themselves as thus is an issue the film does not pause to address, mercifully so given the payloads of exhausting exposition it already has ready to drop on us. In a nutshell, the premise establishes Unicron (voice, Colman Domingo) as a planet-devouring tyrant whose evil robot army comprises the sadistic Scourge (voice, Peter Dinklage), the monstrous Terrorcons and the savage Predacons. For those taking notes, the heroes are the animal-like Maximals, whose number includes metal bird Airazor (Michelle Yeoh) and goofily named gorilla-’bot Optimus Primal (Ron Perlman). Welcome relief arrives as the action moves to New York, 1994. Here, museum researcher Elena (Dominique Fishback) and out-of-work former soldier Noah (Anthony Ramos) cross paths when a mysterious artefact sends out a glowing signal that draws the clashing interests of the Terrorcons and the Autobots, the latter fronted by the stern-faced Optimus Prime (rumbling voice by Peter Cullen). Ramos and Fishback do their best to add human elements to Rise. Impressive in The Hate U Give and Judas and the Black Messiah, the endearing Fishback manages to look plausibly scared during a decent s…

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John Wick: Chapter 4 review – Excess is not a problem
type: item
date: 2023-03-21T17:22:52.000Z
creator: Kevin Harley
subject: Movies
subject: Comment
subject: Review
description: Between bone-breaking fights and decimated apartment blocks the fourth film outdoes its predecessors.
encoded: Even with a 169-minute running time, excess is not a problem in the fourth outing for Keanu Reeves’ zen hitman. Unapologetically, excess is the engine of a film that aspires to outdo its unrestrained predecessors on most fronts and - between bone-breaking fights and decimated apartment blocks – largely fulfils that goal. For audiences who want more of the saga’s criminal underworld lore, globe-trotting opulence, pseudo-philosophical asides and sad-Keanu existential sorrows, satisfaction awaits. Sharper suits? This one has “the latest in ballistic chic”, bulletproof jackets that Reeves wields like Batman’s Kevlar cape. More chances for Reeves to drawl “Yeah”? Yeah, that too. As for more action, returning director Chad Stahelski excels himself by finding fresh ways to maximise the series’ convulsive and cartoon-ish carnage. And even if the plot is blunter than a kick in the head, writers Shay Hatten and Michael Finch navigate the 14 beat-’em-ups involved efficiently. After losing a finger and taking a bullet in Chapter 3, Wick recovers here by punching coiled rope until his remaining knuckles bleed, ready to tackle crime syndicate the High Table. To break his criminal ties, he issues a challenge to the Table’s sadistic envoy, the Marquis de Gramont (Bill Skarsgard), who deploys assassins to kill Wick. Enter Donnie Yen’s blind swordsman Caine and Shamier Anderson’s sharp-shooting Mr Nobody, aka the Tracker, who shares Wick’s love of dogs. MMA star Scott Adkins cameos as the gold-toothed Killa, while Wick’s aides include hotel manager Shimazu (Hiroyuki Sanada) and his daughter Akira (singer Rina Sawayama). Meanwhile, Ian McShane’s Winston returns, supplying balancing notes of whisky-dry calm. While the action takes longer to kick off than in Chapter 3, an early set piece in the Osaka Continental Hotel compensates. The battle between armoured hitmen and Shimazu’s army escalates bracingly, with Yen and Sawayama adding a lightness to the muscle-mania. Indeed, it’s a shame …

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Spirited review: Ryan Reynolds's unruly but enjoyable yuletide romp
type: item
date: 2022-11-14T13:47:19.000Z
creator: Kevin Harley
subject: Movies
subject: Apple TV
subject: Comment
subject: On demand
subject: Review
description: Will Ferrell and Octavia Spencer also star in this fresh musical spin on A Christmas Carol from writer/director Sean Anders.
encoded: In recent years, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol has been subject to numerous radical revamps. Director Robert Zemeckis added motion-capture effects all the way from uncanny valley. Guy Pearce supplied a sociopathic Scrooge, while Doctor Who found room for flying sharks. Even so, co-writer/director Sean Anders’ twist – despite its manifold flaws – finds fresh scope for elaboration in Dickens’s redemptive fable, give or take intermittent lapses into over-familiar, over-egged schmaltz. Featuring songs by Benj Pasek, Justin Paul (both of La La Land and The Greatest Showman fame), Khiyon Hursey, Sukari Jones and Mark Sonnenblick, Spirited is a musical variation on Dickens, brimming with often excessive but exuberant showtune set-pieces. At its core is a nifty conceit pitched somewhere between Charlie Kaufman and Monsters, Inc., wherein the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet-to-Come are part of a secret company of spectres whose job involves turning bad eggs good. They scare because they care, essentially. Almost 20 years after he banked a seasonal staple in Elf, Will Ferrell assumes a more restrained guise as the Ghost of Christmas Present. Ferrell’s spectre has been in the job for two centuries, working alongside – as credited - Past (Sunita Mani) and Yet-to-Come (Loren Woods, voice by Tracy Morgan). While Yet-to-Come aspires to do more than just point ominously, Present is overdue for retirement, which here means a return to the living world. But Ferrell’s long-haul redeemer can’t resist a challenge, which he finds in Ryan Reynolds’ Clint Briggs, a PR cad who thinks nothing of smearing his niece’s tween competitors on social media in order to help her school election bid. Present wants to work some redemptive magic, but might Clint be truly “unredeemable”? If the answer emerges too slowly over Spirited’s 127-minute sprawl, there’s still fun to be had as Clint turns the tables on Present, intent on finding out what is going on in the ghost’s afterlife. And, …

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Wendell & Wild review: Funny, frisky and fully imagined
type: item
date: 2022-10-25T12:29:54.000Z
creator: Kevin Harley
subject: Movies
subject: Netflix
subject: On demand
subject: Review
description: The latest stop-motion fantasy from The Nightmare Before Christmas and Coraline director Henry Selick is a carnival of devilish mischief.
encoded: Between The Nightmare Before Christmas and the button-eyed heebie-jeebies of Coraline, stop-motion director Henry Selick nurtured a niche in gothic outsider tales for tweens and upwards. Despite traces of over-compensation for time lapsed since his preceding film, Selick keeps up the good, ghoulish work with his first feature in 13 years. Funny, frisky and fully imagined, Wendell & Wild is a phantasmagorical pleasure: a carnival of devilish mischief with punk combat boots on, laced with fresh twists on Selick’s preferred twilit turf. Whether or not these twists can be attributed to co-writer Jordan Peele (Get Out, Nope), the results benefit from an infusion of social commentary and a spirit of inclusivity. Alongside unexpected critiques of the prison industrial complex, a welcome emphasis on diversity in the heroine’s classmates and elsewhere helps broaden Selick’s horizons. Said heroine is Kat, winningly voiced by Lyric Ross as a troubled teenager. Keeping her feelings safety-pinned up inside, Kat lost her parents as a kid – a tragedy she blames herself for. Buffeted between schools, she is transferred to a “break the cycle” Catholic institution in run-down Rust Bank, where all is not as it seems. The school’s Father Bests (James Hong) colludes with entrepreneurial types, who are intent on milking the profits from an inhumane business plan. And Angela Bassett’s nun clearly has her own spooky secrets. Meanwhile, where other animated films might treat grief as a springboard for sorrow and sentiment, Selick and Peele have alternative ideas. Kat has demons – and her demons have names. Meet Wendell (Keegan-Michael Key) and Wild (Jordan Peele), daffy underworld denizens who live inside the nostrils of out-sized monster Buffalo Belzer (Ving Rhames). Typically, Wendell and Wild toil away squirting Belzer with magic hair cream to prevent baldness – until they realise that Kat could be their ticket to the overground. While that sounds like plenty to be getting on with, Selic…

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The School for Good and Evil review: A ponderous young-adult fantasy
type: item
date: 2022-10-19T08:00:40.000Z
creator: Kevin Harley
subject: Movies
subject: Netflix
subject: On demand
subject: Review
description: Paul Feig's fantasy film wants to have its fairytale cake and deconstruct it, too.
encoded: Which is to blame, the Wizarding World and The Worst Witch? Or is it Once Upon a Time and Disney Channel’s Descendants? Either way, any film about reimagined fairytales and magic schools is perhaps doomed to struggle in a market already well stocked with spells and storybook characters. That problem weighs heavy on this ponderous young-adult fantasy, adapted from the first in Soman Chainani’s series of books. While director Paul Feig (Bridesmaids, Ghostbusters) seems a good fit for Chainani’s theme of female friendship, the film’s fantasy elements arrive as a gaudy pageant of the over-familiar, made stifling by the sheer weight of world-building involved. Essentially, there’s enough lofty lore here to buckle Harry Potter’s broomstick. After a blustery prologue, the story starts modestly enough with the bond between Sophie (Sophia Anne Caruso) and Agatha (Sofia Wylie), young misfits in the village of Gavaldon. While Sophie dreams of training as a fairytale princess at the mythical School for Good and Evil, Agatha has the makings of a witch. When a mysterious force whisks the duo to magic school, their roles are flipped. Is the sorting hat on the fritz, or does it know something we do not? Either way, Sophie is streamed into the school for Evil under Lady Lesso (Charlize Theron), while Agatha lands in the Good house under the beneficent watch of Professor Dovey (Kerry Washington). While the friends' attempts to fix this issue provide a solid storytelling spine, the plot soon loses focus. Faced with the demands of a secondary school story, expansive mythologising and a crowded intake of students, Feig and co-writer David Magee lean on exposition to navigate a muddled narrative, with deadening results. Making heavy weather of introducing the warring brothers – embodiments of good and evil – behind the school, the prologue alone groans with backstory. Elsewhere, the dialogue labours the obvious. It’s the kind of film where characters are compelled to say, "I thought fair…

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Hocus Pocus 2 review: Something nostalgic this way comes
type: item
date: 2022-09-29T13:00:44.000Z
creator: Kevin Harley
subject: Movies
subject: Disney Plus
subject: On demand
subject: Review
description: The uneven Disney Plus sequel is most successful when it leans into the Halloween hokum and pays tribute to the original.
encoded: Despite poor initial reviews and ticket sales, Disney’s Hocus Pocus went on to fill a cult-ish gap in the market for high-camp comedy in Halloween fancy-dress. While the plot and tone showed all the focus of a lurching, headless zombie, stars Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker and Kathy Najimy embraced the silliness gamely as Salem witches the Sanderson sisters. Almost 30 years on, the similarly muddled sequel works best when it emphasises the sorceresses’ sister act, emerging as a knowing tribute in sequel disguise. Recognising the Sandersons’ importance to the title’s appeal, Jen D’Angelo’s script opens with a 1653-set origins vignette. The young Winifred (Midler), Sarah (Parker) and Mary (Najimy) were just girls who wanted to have fun after all, especially if goats’ blood-flavoured jelly (“Look, it jiggleth!”) was involved, until the pious Reverend Traske (Tony Hale) banished them from Salem. Meanwhile, in 2022, teenagers Becca (Whitney Peak) and Izzy (Belissa Escobedo) inadvertently reawaken the 17th century sisters when Halloween shop-owner (and secret Sanderson fan-boy) Gilbert (Sam Richardson) sells the duo a black-flame candle he claims is fake. Lit in the woods, the magical candle resurrects the Sandersons, who instantly break into song before haplessly attempting to wreak revenge on Salem. As the Sandersons seek children to boil in pursuit of eternal youth, the set-up saddles director Anne Fletcher with tonal problems. Are the witches villains, or just misunderstood mischief-makers? But the disregard for consistency is flagrant enough to seem self-aware, and Fletcher duly milks her hoary horror ingredients for arch comic returns. Modernising touches emerge, ranging from high-school tensions to gags about the Halloween and beauty industries. While D’Angelo also plays with ideas about the patriarchal fear of girls growing up, these subtexts are soon sacrificed to the spectacle of Midler, Parker and Najimy goofing it up like overgrown kids. Between a makeover…

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