Joseph Walsh
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Film Review: The Jungle Book
★★★★☆ Remakes can often find themselves balancing precariously on a knife’s edge. Indulge in too much reverence to the original and you aren’t innovating enough. Abandon what made the first rendition such a success and audiences won’t have that satisfying trip down memory lane. Jon Favreau has an even harder task because his latest film…
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Film Review: The Huntsman: Winter’s War
★★☆☆☆ Four years on from Rupert Sanders’ critically derided yet financially lucrative Snow White and The Huntsman we have the delayed, inevitable follow-up: The Huntsman: Winter’s War. Chris Hemsworth is back as the axe-wielding hero in a loose retelling of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen. In many ways this is an adult Frozen with…
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Film Review: Sisters
★★★★☆ Tina Fey and Amy Poehler pair up once more for the raucous quasi-Christmas comedy Sisters (2015). Penned by Saturday Night Live writer Paula Pell and helmed by Pitch Perfect (2012) director Jason Moore, the comedy sees Poehler and Fey star as Maura and Kate Ellis, two siblings approaching middle age. Maura is a divorcee,…
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DVD Review: Fantastic Four
★★☆☆☆ Whichever way you look at the negative buzz surrounding Josh Trank’s Fantastic Four (2015), it seems to have confirmed its fate before audiences could even see it. Admittedly, after the success of Trank’s debut feature Chronicle (2012), anticipation would be high and audiences are right to demand something special. It’s been widely reported that…
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Film Review: ‘The Good Dinosaur’
★★★★★ From first-time feature director Peter Sohn, Disney Pixar’s latest The Good Dinosaur is a crowning triumph, blending jaw-dropping photorealistic animation with a heart-wrenchingly beautiful tale of friendship against the odds. When Inside Out was released earlier in the year, many thought that it was a sure bet for Best Animated Feature at the Academy…
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Film Review: ‘Black Mass’
★★★☆☆ Scott Cooper’s real-life crime drama Black Mass (2015) is constantly trying to escape the looming shadow of past gangster cinema triumphs. It all too readily falls into the comfortable tropes of the genre whilst failing to provide a comprehensive and engaging biopic of one of Boston’s most notorious mob bosses. When it bowed at…
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DVD Review: ‘Southpaw’
★★☆☆☆ When the first image for Antoine Fuqua’s Southpaw (2015) was released online of a muscle-bound Jake Gyllenhaal audiences became very excited. The anticipation was in part due to the Gyllenhaal’s remarkable performance as the ghoulish Louis Bloom in Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler (2014). The physical transformation from the wraith-like Bloom to Southpaw‘s central protagonist Billy…
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DVD Review: ‘Inside Out’
★★★★☆ Pixar have knocked it out of the park with new film Inside Out (2015), which premièred at Cannes earlier this year. Directors Pete Docter and Ronaldo Del Carmen have crafted a cerebral comedy, loaded with smart, witty humour and a great deal of meta-emotional intelligence. The story opens with the birth of Riley. At…
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Film Review: ‘My Nazi Legacy’
★★★★☆ David Evans’ My Nazi Legacy (2015) opens with a potent challenge – to imagine what it would be like to grow up as the child of a mass murderer. This hard proposal is just the beginning of what is a harrowing, complex documentary that expertly explores the legacy of the Holocaust through the intertwining history…
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Film Review: ‘The Perfect Guy’
★★☆☆☆ While not entirely devoid of merit, David M. Rosenthal’s trashy erotic thriller The Perfect Guy (2015) poorly imitates Fatal Attraction (1987) and Single White Female (1992), along with a hundred other examples of the genre that it has cherry-picked from. Sanaa Lathan is the suited and booted lobbyist Leah – although her character is…