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The X-Files 7.1: The Sixth Extinction   You see what happens when The X-Files gets hold of a really strong idea and then progressively mutilates and dilutes it, eventually reaching a point where you wish they’d just left well alone? The Sixth Extinction isn’t there yet, but we see Carter bottling it in the most egregious and insulting fashion over the three episodes of this arc. This is less a case of shark jumping than just very wasteful, indulgent and ultimately redundant plotting. Scully: He’s not dying. He’s more alive than he has ever been. He’s more alive than his

The X-Files 6.22: Biogenesis   As others have noted, there are some not insignificant similarities between Biogenesis and Season 2 finale – generally touted as the best X-Files season finale – Anasazi. You’ve got Mulder going doolally. you’ve got Albert Hosteen (kind of, here). You got a long-dormant piece of unearthed alien evidence that sustains the plot and informs the mythology. And you’ve got the water-cooler-event cliffhanger. And I know this is going to be far from the majority view, but I actually rate Biogenesis higher. Bible: Genesis 1:28 – And God blessed them, and God said unto them, be

The Forgiven (2021)   By this point, the differences between filmmaker John Michael McDonagh and his younger brother, filmmaker and playwright Martin McDonagh, are fairly clearly established. Both wear badges of irreverence and provocation in their writing, and a willingness to tackle – or take pot-shots – at bigger issues, ones that may find them dangling their toes in hot water. But Martin receives the lion’s share of the critical attention, while John is generally recognised as the slightly lesser light. Sure, some might mistake Seven Psychopaths for a John movie, and Calvary for a Martin one, but there’s a more flagrant sense of attention seeking

Stranger Things Season 4: Volume 1   I haven’t had cause, or the urge, to revisit earlier seasons of Stranger Things, but I’m fairly certain my (relatively) positive takes on the first two sequel seasons would adjust down somewhat if I did (a Soviet base under Hawkins? DUMB soft disclosure or not, it’s pretty dumb). In my Season 3 review, I called the show “Netflix’s best-packaged junk food. It knows not to outstay its welcome, doesn’t cause bloat and is disposable in mostly good ways” I’m fairly certain the Duffer’s weren’t reading, but it’s as if they decided, as a rebuke,

Raised by Wolves Season 1   Ridley Scott’s latest transhumanist tract is so stuffed with required lore, markers and programming, it’s a miracle it manages to tell a half-engaging story along the way. Aaron Guzikowski (Prisoners) is the credited creator, but it has the Ridders stamp of dour dystopia all over it, complete with Darius Wolski (Prometheus) cinematography setting the tone. Which means bleak grey skies, augmented by South Africa this time, rather than Iceland. Raised by Wolves is a reliable mix of whacko twist plotting and clumsy, slack-jawed messaging; like the Alien prequels, it will surely never be seen through to a conclusion,

The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2021)   The problems with The Eyes of Tammy Faye are the perennial ones of the biopic; it’s either unable or unwilling to break the shackles of straight, literal-minded regurgitation and become a movie in its own right. Occasionally, one sees glimmers, particularly in the performances of Andrew Garfield and Jessica Chastain, at times so heightened they verge on camp, but screenwriter Abe Sylvia (working from the 2000 Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato doc) and director Michael Showalter lack the flair to push it into more interesting territory. I’m not especially familiar with the Jim and Tammy

Midnight Mass (2021)   Midnight Mass, Mike Flanagan’s “deeply personal” Netflix horror, at least comes to the party with something to say. The problem is that its discourse is neither terribly original nor insightful, and it proceeds to rehearse it again and again, to diminishing effect, in ever longer monologues throughout its characteristically luxuriant (some might say a little baggy) runtime. It’s probably more interesting, then, as a metaphor, albeit one that wasn’t Flanagan’s express intent. I’m unconvinced by Flanagan’s growing rep as the second coming of the horror auteur. He seems to veer closer to a more proficient Mick

Minari (2020)   Minari is one of this year’s better Best Picture Oscar nominees. Which is rather damning it with faint praise, but there you go. A tale of noble immigrants (are there any other kind?) facing a hard time of it in rural Arkansas, Lee Isaac Chung’s film boasts the commendable virtue of modesty. It avoids leading the way with any announcement of its own importance, and in its own low-key way, it offers a degree of authenticity the other contenders largely lack. It doesn’t hurt matters either that it’s so perceptively performed. Perhaps the closest fellow nominee in terms

Slaughterhouse-Five (1972)   It’s little surprise this adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s science-fiction classic has drifted into obscurity. As director George Roy Hill’s follow up to his breakout hit Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and preceding the even bigger success of The Sting, it might be seen as occupying similar territory to, say, Peter Jackson misfiring with The Lovely Bones between Tolkiens (give or take a Kong). The Slaughterhouse-Five novel was only three years old when the movie came out, and if the audience reception was muted, it nevertheless garnered the Jury Prize at Cannes (so it was certainly better received than Jackson’s unloved effort). Vonnegut was profusive in

The Omen (1976)   The coming of the Antichrist is an evergreen; his incarnation, or the reveal thereof, is always just round the corner, and he can always be definitively identified in any given age through a spot of judiciously subjective interpretation of The Book of Revelation, or Nostradamus. Probably nothing did more for the subject in the current era, in terms of making it part of popular culture, than The Omen. That’s irrespective of the movie’s quality, of course. Which, it has to be admitted, is not on the same level as earlier demonic forebears Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist. In which regard, horror

Candy (1968)   There’s no way anyone could get away with making it today. I’ll wager that’s the immediate reaction of anyone seeing Candy for the first time. Which, much as I’m adverse to outrage culture, is probably a positive. There’s something inherently suspect about satirising a subject through embracing it wholeheartedly, as this adaptation of the 1958 novel’s trawl through a pornographic America rather bears out. It’s tantamount to suggesting the oeuvre of Eli Roth is actually a commentary on violence. Nevertheless, while Candy isn’t a good movie, attempting as it does to filter its satirical subjects through a Confessions of a Window Cleaner-style level of

Prince of Darkness (1987)   John Carpenter’s wounded retreat from the traumas of big studio moviemaking saw its first fruit in this cult curio. Not as legendary as his subsequent They Live! but also very influential in its own scrappy way, as well as being very influenced in its own right (most particularly, and self-confessedly on Carpenter’s part, by Nigel Kneale). Prince of Darkness is also less satisfying than They Live! although its ancient astronauts take still produces several highly memorable moments. Mostly, the movie’s shortcomings are down to the execution, but that’s not because it’s cheap per se. Rather, Carpenter failed to surround himself with

Elmer Gantry (1960)   Richard Brooks was something of an Oscar regular by the time he made Elmer Gantry. The Blackboard Jungle, The Brothers Karamazov and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof had all garnered attention; he’d continue to keep that up during the ‘60s. Gantry receiving the nominations it did (five, including Best Picture), feels like a surprise in some ways, though: that the Academy would recognise material so overtly critical of religion, or by implication, through broadsiding those treating it like a business. That may partly be because its source material dates back to Sinclair Lewis’ 1927 novel, so there’s a literary pedigree,

First Reformed (2017)   This uneven at best Roman Catholic – I know, it concerns a protestant church, but who are we trying to kid? – eco-guilt picture from Paul Schrader that has been hailed as his best in years. Which it probably is, but these things are relative. Schrader has made, for the first hour or so, a reasonably engrossing study of faith, doubt and despair, but his choices after that, particularly during the last half hour, undo much of the effort. As one of Hollywood’s go-to practising Catholics (step forward also Marty) it should be no surprise that

Kingdom of Heaven (2005)   (Director’s Cut) There’s an oft-cited view that Kingdom of Heaven, in its unexpurgated as-Ridley-honest-to-goodness-intended director’s cut – in contrast to some of his other, rather superfluous director’s cuts, in which case – is a goddam masterpiece. It isn’t, I’m afraid. First and foremost, Orlando Bloom is not miraculously transformed into a leading man with any presence, substance or conviction. But there are numerous other problems besides, still more than evident, mostly in the form of the revisionist pose William Monahan’s screenplay adopts and the blundering lack of subtlety with which his director translates it. As is

The X-Files 11.9: Nothing Lasts Forever   More new blood, and lashings of it too, courtesy of series script coordinator Karen Nielsen, albeit helmed once again by James Wong. A very modern vampire tale, complete with queasy variant on The Human Centipede for good (or bad) measure, Nothing Lasts Forever has two strong guest star performances going for it but little else. One of those is courtesy of Fiona Vroom as 85-year old former sitcom star Barbara Beaumont, who ensconces herself in her apartment building, cult acolytes feeding on her every word and she feeding on them (or whatever organs can be harvested thereby).

Silence (2016)   Martin Scorsese has now met the Pope, so I guess the thirty-year slog to make Silence was all worthwhile. I’m dubious that he’d have been granted an audience with his venerable holiness off the back of The Last Temptation of Christ, but then you never know with this one, not even quite how nefarious he may or may not be compared to his predecessors. In the documentary attached to the Blu-ray, Scorsese mulls of the material (based on Shusaka Endo’s 1966 novel, previously adapted in 1971), that “Everyone’s right and everyone’s wrong”. For the shoguns, the burgeoning trend towards Christianity

Penda’s Fen (1974)   Confession time: I wasn’t even aware Penda’s Fen existed before reading a recent Fortean Times piece on haunted childhoods of the ’70s: curious in itself, as Play for Today wasn’t exactly teatime, Basil Brush and Doctor Who, viewing (I guess they’re taking in inquisitive teenagers). But it’s very easy to see why the piece, directed by Alan Clarke from a teleplay by David Rudkin, had an impact on impressionable young minds. It’s just the sort of fare, with its open countryside and occult undertones, that proves indelible, in the manner of Children of the Stones or The Owl Service (or Alan Garner generally). That, and simply the way that

The Wicker Man (1973)   (Final Cut) There’s a strange kind of alchemy taking place in The Wicker Man, perhaps appropriate to a picture exploring the systems and structures of belief that inform our reality. Somehow it is transmuted into much more than its constituent parts. That may merely be a function of the era in which it was made, influences in the prevailing air coalescing, fusing, and forming something unique, but such an event could hardly be seen as commonplace even then. Whenever a picture is described as bearing a similarity to The Wicker Man, it’s usually nothing of the sort

Horror Express (1972)   This berserk Spanish/British horror boasts Hammer titans Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing (both as good guys!) to its name, and cloaked in period trappings (it’s set in 1906), suggests a fairly standard supernatural horror, one with crazy priests and satanic beasts. But, with an alien life form aboard the Trans-Siberian Express bound for Moscow, Horror Express finishes up more akin to The Cassandra Crossing meets The Thing. Countess Petrovski: The czar will hear of this. I’ll have you sent to Siberia. Captain Kazan: I am in Siberia! Christopher Lee’s Alexander Saxton, anthropologist and professor of the Royal Geological Society, has retrieved a frozen

Gandhi (1982)   Gandhi’s opening text references the importance of trying to find one’s way to the heart of the man in recounting his life, and unfortunately, though unsurprisingly, you couldn’t say Sir Dickie Attenborough succeeded in his enormous epic, duly crowned with the Best Picture Oscar (and BAFTA) for being an enormous epic. It’s a largely reverent, respectful, uninvolved film that mimics the tools of spectacle and canvas from that master of the enormous epic David Lean (who had planned his own version, with, naturally Alec Guinness in the title role; we saw how well that went down in A Passage

Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977)   While I’ve seen instalments the original and III a number of times, I hadn’t got round to checking out the near-universally reviled first Exorcist sequel until now. Going in, I had lofty notions Exorcist II: The Heretic would reveal itself as not nearly the travesty everyone said it was. Rather, that it would be deserving of some degree of praise, if only it was approached in the right manner. Well, there is something to that; as a sequel to The Exorcist, it sneers at preconceptions right off the bat by wholly failing to terrify, so its determined existence within the fabric of that film

Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977)   Or plain old Star Wars, as it used to be, long ago. What’s there left to say about this defining picture? Well, it bears emphasising that, for all the deserved flak George Lucas has received since, and especially considering the stresses and strains afflicting him during its making, it’s an astonishingly complete piece of world building. All the more so as Lucas isn’t a flashy visualist in the mode of many of his wunderkind peers. His shooting style is classical, and his most notable affectations (such as screen wipes) derive from ’30s

Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief  (2015)   Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief is a typically first-rate piece of documentary filmmaking from HBO and director Alex Gibney (an Oscar winner for Taxi to the Dark Side), based on Lawrence Wright’s scientology exposé of the same name. Notably, Wright is one of the talking heads in an engrossing, fascinating, densely packed piece, and he sets out that an exposé was not his intent; he merely intended to understand what it was the church’s members got out of their religion. If Going Clear has a fault, it’s that it’s transparently one-sided, and so

Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014)   The immediate question that springs to mind with Exodus: Gods and Kings is “Who is this for?” The core audience for a Biblical epic is surely the hallowed Christian ticket, one that promises potential rewards on a vast scale (The Passion of the Christ). So why make a movie where the Old Testament protagonist’s communication with God is implied to be all in his own head, and where God’s interventions – at least in part – are serviced with “feasible” scientific explanations? Noah also went off message, and had a God who was profoundly silent (not surprising from

1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992)   Ridley Scott’s first historical epic (The Duellists was his first historical, and his first feature, but hardly an epic) is also one of his least remembered films. It bombed at the box office (as did the year’s other attempted cash-ins on the discovery of America, including Superman: The Movie producers the Salkinds’ Christopher Columbus: The Discovery) and met with a less than rapturous response from critics. Such shunning is undeserved, as 1492: Conquest of Paradise is a richer and more thought-provoking experience than both the avowedly lowbrow Gladiator and the re-evaluated-but-still-so-so director’s cut of Kingdom of Heaven. It may stand guilty of

Dean Spanley (2008)   There is such a profusion of average, respectable – but immaculately made – British period drama held up for instant adulation, it’s hardly surprising that, when something truly worthy of acclaim comes along, it should be singularly ignored. To be fair, Dean Spanley was well liked by critics upon its release, but its subsequent impact has proved disappointingly slight. Based on Lord Dunsany’s 1939 novella, My Talks with Dean Spanley, our narrator relates how the titular Dean’s imbibification of a moderate quantity of Imperial Tokay (“too syrupy”, is the conclusion reached by both members of the Fisk family regarding this

The Rapture (1991)   Michael Tolkin was Hollywood flavour of the month for a brief spell following the acclaim that greeted his script for The Player, which revolved around Hollywood flavours of the month. It bagged him an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay but his subsequent movie career has been patchy, consisting mostly of script doctoring here and there. This may be partly because his name is associated, rightly or wrongly, with that rarefied field (for Tinsteltown) of thoughtful discourses on morality, religion and metaphysics. There isn’t much call for such musings most of the time; fast food versions

The Leftovers Season One: Part 2   The second half of Season One of The Leftovers evidences a series that has found its feet, and then some. Each episode is a standout in its own way, from Nora’s strange encounters at a departure conference, to Kevin’s mad dad running loose, and his National Geographic fixation (very Lindelof, that), to the stunning encounter with Patti in a cabin in the woods, to the inevitable flashback episode that explains everything and nothing, and on to the finale with its tenuous optimistic note. Doubtless that still point is set to be shattered in 2015; HBO has confirmed

The Zero Theorem (2013)   I’m prone to anticipating the arrival of a new Terry Gilliam film more than the fare of any other filmmaker, barring perhaps Joe Dante.  And yet I have learned to temper my expectations in recent years. Whether it’s been a continued difficulty (of temperament?) in getting projects off the ground, the limitations of budget infringing on his high-powered imagination, or simply that he is past his prime, nothing he has made since Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas has attained consistent greatness. That said, I enjoyed The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus immensely; inconsistent, certainly, but it proved to be a

Beautiful Creatures (2013)   Another week, another failed Young Adult adaptation. This one floundered on its release about this time last year and it’s easy to see why. Possessed of the Southern flavour flaunted by True Blood, but without the libido, Beautiful Creatures is entirely mechanical in its construction of a supernatural world where teenagers both mortal and immortal (see Twilight) interact in a post-Whedon landscape of chosen ones and dark destinies. Richard La Gravenese, who made a splash early in his career with The Fisher King for Terry Gilliam, does his best on scripting and megaphone duties, but he’s unable to wring out anything very

The Host (2013)   Given the left-field choices of helmers for some of the Young Adult lit adaptations, you’d think the failures would be more interesting than they are. Then again, Andrew Niccol garnered notices early on as both writer (The Truman Show) and director (Gattaca), but since then his reach has exceeded his grasp. He’s continued to stretch for more cerebral fare but usually ends up botching it. But surely, he could lend a few morsels of food for thought to this attempt at extending Stephanie Meyer’s movie life beyond the Twilight franchise? Well no, not really. Niccol’s previous picture In Time was

The Abominable Snowman (1957)   The Abominable Snowman follows the first two Quatermass serials as the third Hammer adaptation of a Nigel Kneale BBC work. As with those films, Val Guest takes the directorial reins, to mixed results. Hammer staple Peter Cushing repeats his role from The Creature (the title of the original teleplay). The result is worthy in sentiment but unexceptional in dramatic heft. Guest fails to balance Kneale’s idea of essentially sympathetic creatures with the disintegration of the group bent on finding them. Nevertheless, Kneale’s premise still stands out. The idea that the Yeti is an essentially shy, peaceful, cryptozoological beastie is now

The Box of Delights (1984)   If you were at a formative age when it was first broadcast, a festive viewing of The Box of Delights may well have become an annual ritual. The BBC adaptation of John Masefield’s 1935 novel is perhaps the ultimate cosy yuletide treat. On a TV screen, at any rate. To an extent, this is exactly the kind of unashamedly middle class-orientated bread-and-butter period production the corporation now thinks twice about; ever so posh kids having jolly adventures in a nostalgic netherworld of Interwar Britannia. Fortunately, there’s more to it than that. There is something genuinely evocative

Repo Man  (1984)   In fairness, I should probably check out more Alex Cox’s later works. That is, before I consign him to the status of one who never made good on the potential of his early success. But the bits and pieces I’ve seen don’t hold much sway. I pretty much gave up on him after Walker. It seemed as if the accessibility of Repo Man was a happy accident, and he was subsequently content to drift further and further down his own post-modern punk rabbit hole, as if affronted by the “THE MOST ASTONISHING FEATURE FILM DEBUT SINCE STEVEN SPIELBERG’S DUEL”

Doctor Who The Underwater Menace: Episode Four   It’s probably not too surprising that Thous survives being shot, as Zaroff wasn’t exactly taking careful aim. Ben: He doesn’t look too good, though. The Doctor: Neither would you, with a bullet in you. Episode Four, even though it suffers as most of the season so far does from being action-orientated and missing from the archives, works well as a fast-moving mini-disaster movie told over 25 minutes. One which is initiated by the Doctor, another in a run of extreme measures the new incarnation has enacted in order to resolve what he considers to

Doctor Who The Underwater Menace: Episode Three   Episode Three is pretty much 25 minutes of filler, revolving around a kidnap attempt on Zaroff and Sean encouraging the fish people to engage in industrial action. But, laughable (intentional or otherwise) as the plot mechanics may be, this is never dull. Smith keeps the action zipping along. She has limited space at her disposal, but ensures the action scenes are tightly shot and well-edited. This means that, even when the staging isn’t especially convincing (the crowded market square, all thirty feet of it, the fight between Jamie and Zaroff), it’s a