• Night School

    From: The Administrative Office, Movie House Academy Subject: Group Assessment Feedback Dear parents, As you are aware, your children’s class was asked to submit a group project for end of term assessment. The marks for this piece of work, entitled Night School, will help determine end of year grades. Please find feedback on this project below. Mr. and Mrs. Hart: your son, Kevin, was shown he can be an amiable, if comicly scattershot presence, especially as part of a solid double-act. But if he is to improve his work he needs firmer direction: his role here, as Teddy Walker, a high school…

  • Girls Trip

    Some movies are made for audiences. Not in a buck-passing ‘we made it for the fans, not the critics’ way that follows deserved Tomatometer mauling. It’s rather that in certain contexts, a movie’s qualities can be amplified, and its flaws made to seem less important. The Fifty Shades movies, for example, were marketed as ‘events’, a go-to destination for gaggles of girlfriends on a tipsy, fizzy Friday night out (there were, you may recall, ~scenes~). But the movies themselves — weirdly sexless, soap-opera slow, self-serious mood rock — didn’t live up to this promise. New mad-weekend comedy Girls Trip, though, does: on Netflix it…