MARK DAVISON

Review: Paul – Close Encounters of the Blurred Minds

3rd March 2011 | 1 comments | 0 votes yet, click here to agree or disagree

Would it be premature to bestow Simon Pegg with the status of 'national treasure'? Judging by the massive success of Paul's opening week in the UK it looks like he's heading there anyway.

Although if there was such a thing as a 'sure thing' at the box office, Paul would be it (well, in Britain at least). Following increasing interest in Pegg and Nick Frost's big screen outings; several TV stations...

Read more »

The Top Ten Films of 2010

23rd December 2010 | 3 comments | 0 votes yet, click here to agree or disagree

And finally onto films. This was honestly the hardest of the three lists to compile as there wasn't a huge amount of films that really excited me this year, and I sadly missed out on plenty of films that did look like best of the year contenders (in the past month alone I've not been able to catch Monsters, Uncle Boonmee and Of Gods and Men). But still, that's not...

Read more »

Review: The Kids Are All Right – but they could be better

5th November 2010 | 1 comments | 0 votes yet, click here to agree or disagree

Arriving on a wave of considerable awards buzz, The Kids Are All Right is the latest - and already the most successful - movie by writer/director Lisa Cholodenko, previously best known for High Art and Laurel Canyon. Like those films sexual identity is a central plot concern, which has caused the film to become the subject of plenty of column inches what with the issue of gay marriage still...

Read more »

Review: Red – Old Dogs, Few Tricks

27th October 2010 | 0 comments | 0 votes yet, click here to agree or disagree

Over the past year or so there seems to have been a weird trend going on in Hollywood comedies for plots that involve the hero kidnapping a woman (normally with the excuse of it being for her own good) and them falling in love along the way. Red is yet another example of this, in this case the hero being lonely, retired CIA Agent Bruce Willis, who after surviving a...

Read more »

Review: Kick-Ass – And It Certainly Does!

7th April 2010 | 3 comments | 0 votes yet, click here to agree or disagree

Anticipated with fairly equal amounts of eagerness and dread, Kick-Ass is the latest adaptation of a Mark Millar comic, following on from the Angelina Jolie/James McAvoy-starring Wanted. Although it goes without saying that it manages to improve on that execrable waste of celluloid, it’s a pleasure to report that Kick-Ass is a genuinely great film. Much of the credit has to go to Stardust/Layer Cake director Matthew Vaughn (to this...

Read more »

Review: Alice in Wonderland – Frankly Maddening

9th March 2010 | 4 comments | 1 person likes this

When it was announced that Tim Burton was going to turn Alice in Wonderland into a big budget 3D movie for Disney, there was a fair amount of excitement from both critics and the public. Although he has his fair share of detractors, it's impossible to deny that Burton has a distinctive sense of visual style and can create genuinely wondrous moments in his films, plus with the involvement of...

Read more »

Princess and The Frog, Ponyo and Percy Jackson – A Half-Term Review Roundup

16th February 2010 | 0 comments | 1 person likes this

With the kids being out of school we’re faced with the usual bombardment of family-friendly films and it can be hard to know what the best choice can be. With the price of cinema admission being so high, and with so many kids films being pretty ropey, it’s probably tempting to think of avoiding the cinema altogether. What follows are a few short reviews of the options for this half...

Read more »

Review: Up In The Air – A Film For Our Time?

19th January 2010 | 0 comments | 0 votes yet, click here to agree or disagree

Timely adapted from Thumbsucker author Walter Kirn’s novel of the same name by Jason Reitman (previously best known as the director of love-it or hate-it Juno, and son of Ghostbusters director Ivan Reitman), Up in the Air follows George Clooney’s Ryan Bingham as he flies from city to city to make mass redundancies as efficient (and anonymous) as possible. It could be argued that what is essentially a mid-sized indie...

Read more »

The Top Ten Films of 2009

4th January 2010 | 3 comments | 1 person likes this

To be honest a list of the worst films of the year would have been easier – not that there haven’t been some excellent films released this year, it’s just that I feel like I've seen an awful lot of disappointing and downright unpleasant ones this year (Benjamin Button and Gamer are probably the worst offenders for me). It should be noted that owing to circumstances I haven’t gotten around...

Read more »