In June 2013, I wrote a review of Despicable Me 2 in which I criticised the Minions as “the embodiment of stupidity; relying on the presumption that the only things kids find funny are toilet humour, effeminate behaviour…
Films produced with the sole purpose of allowing a studio to retain the rights to a franchise have a bad track record (see The Amazing…
It takes a special kind of director to take the charisma out of Chris Pratt, the fun out of Spielberg and the magic out of dinosaurs, yet Colin Trevorrow of Safety Not Guaranteed…
Roland Emmerich’s two great skills as a maker of big-budget disaster epics: his fondness for showing the global, rather than simply local, effects of crisis and horror, and his ability to convey genuine (be it hammily-acted) emotional…
Melissa McCarthy, it emerged with last summer’s horrifically crude but shamefully unfunny vanity project Tammy, has no range. This fact is compounded even further in Spy, a film with substantially more merit…
Pitch Perfect 2 features an almost entirely female ensemble cast, is directed by a woman (Elizabeth Banks), is aimed at a largely female audience and features a strong theme of “Girl Power!”, yet the most feminist film released in…
George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road has hardly any plot, hardly any dialogue and no particularly compelling aesthetic imagery. Yet this diesel-powered romp has, with currently 98% on Rotten Tomatoes, become…