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The Blues Brothers (1980)   I had limited awareness of John Belushi’s immense mythos before The Blues Brothers arrived on retail video in the UK (so 1991?) My familiarity with SNL performers really began with Ghostbusters’ release, which meant picking up the trail of Jake and Elwood was very much a retrospective deal. I knew Animal House, knew Belushi’s impact there, knew 1941 (the Jaws parody was the best bit), knew Wired was a biopic better avoided. But the minor renaissance he, and they, underwent in the UK in the early ’90s seemed to have been initiated by Jive Bunny and the Mastermixers, of all things; Everybody Needs Somebody was part of their That Sounds

Bill & Ted Face the Music (2020)   Bill and Ted’s remissness has led to existence itself hanging in the balance, fiddling while the universe goes to pot. The duo are much like us, basically, ignoring the inexorable inevitable creeping up on them until it seems like it’s too late. It would probably be a stretch to accuse Bill & Ted Face the Music of predictive programming, given its long gestation period. But then again, this is a movie where the saviours of everything turn out to be women rather than irredeemably useless white men. And their lives’ “work” culminates in 2020, after which

Yesterday (2019)   Danny Boyle’s paean to The Beatles via a scenario where they – as a band, rather than the individuals themselves – have been winked out of existence during a power surge is a cute enough Mandela Effect conceit; only Himesh Patel, and eventually two others, have any recollection of their existence. But the result, scripted by self-professed muso Richard Curtis – see The Boat That Rocked, or rather don’t – from a story by Jack Barth, is weak swill. Apparently, $10m of Yesterday‘s $26m budget was spent securing rights to use the Fab Four’s songs, but you have to

Love & Mercy (2014)   Well here’s a surprise: a decent biopic. Probably because Love & Mercy isn’t slavishly fuelled by a sense of its own importance, and because it stresses the emotional life rather than the itemised history of its protagonist. Who is Brian Wilson, in his twenties and forties, portrayed by Paul Dano and John Cusack respectively. Which was even more of a surprise, as I didn’t spend the duration possessed with the urge to thump Dano, who generally is just that kind of performer (and, I’m not a violent man, Mr Fawlty). So the skill of Bill Pohlad (more usually a

Begin Again (2013)   What better way for the director of the weightless Once to advance his stalled career (I had no idea he made two films – three if you include a TV movie – in between that and this, probably because neither did anyone else) than to make an equally weightless movie, but this time with movie stars? That’s pretty much Begin Again, another music business tale, revolving around dreams, love and impossibly good-natured calorie-free aspirational fluff. Mark Ruffalo tries his best, but even he is unable to add any added value in the face of the deluge that is the

Quartet (2012)   I’m fully behind the rise of OAP cinema, if there actually is a nascent subgenre forming (see also The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel). Or should I say, British OAP cinema (I’m not including Amour, which is a chin-stroking affair for middle-aged types). I don’t know if the appeal is a nostalgic twinge for the days of ruling classes and Empire (the British in India, the cultural hierarchy of opera), a desire to see an assembly of the great and good of British thespdom, or simply of movies catering for certain age groups so rarely. But the fact that these