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  • Review: The Box – can’t get no satisfaction

    Review: The Box – can’t get no satisfaction

    7th December 2009 | 3 comments | 2 people like this

    Richard Kelly, who wrote and directed Donnie Darko, is behind The Box, and it is essentially another confusing, metaphysical period piece filled with sci-fi sensibilities and half-formed ideas powered by lofty ambitions. Whilst Donnie Darko worked because it integrated this into a story that was essentially about teenage angst and romance, The Box has no such anchoring narrative. As such it drifts into the absurd, feeling inconsistent, incomprehensible and worst...

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  • Review: 9 – ragtag and pretty rubbish

    Review: 9 – ragtag and pretty rubbish

    2nd November 2009 | 1 comments | 2 people like this

    It’s difficult to tell what exactly 9 wants to be. It has ‘cute’, miniature characters made from cloth sacking and mannequin parts. It has a post-apocalyptic setting. It has some loosely adult themes and some over the top action sequences. It mixes science, magic, religion and politics, and examines the human condition by distilling it into its distinct parts. And yet it manages to be entirely unoriginal, underwritten, frustrating, clichéd,...

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  • Review: District 9 sci-fi with a message

    Review: District 9 sci-fi with a message

    9th September 2009 | 6 comments | 2 people like this

    Directed by visual effects virtuoso Neill Blomkamp, District 9 is a sci-fi movie that doesn’t make concessions in order to appeal to younger audiences, creating a gritty, violent and disturbing vision of a world in which visiting aliens have become second class citizens. But do the underlying politics sit comfortably next to the visceral destruction?

    Set in South Africa two decades after the arrival of an Alien mother ship, the animalistic...

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CONTRIBUTOR

Joe West

Joe West

Joe is a writer based in the UK. He is passionate about films, as well as video games and literature, and regularly blogs about new releases as well as forgotten classics and undiscovered gems from around the globe. Sometime's you'll find his posts peppered with fruity, pretentious language, but he means well.

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