• Shazam!

    April 9, 2019 - By 

    Bam! A flash of lightning hits and, just like that, D.C.’s moviescape jolts into life, pumped up on the wisecrack adrenaline of hot red and yellow. Losing faith in its core Clark and Bruce brand, Warner Bros. and D.C. Studios are finding returns pivoting towards the weird and the unexpected. After all, their most entertaining round of post-Nolan superheroics was the one hardly anybody actually saw: last year’s Teen Titans Go! To the Movies, a self-aware, colourful, sing-songy adventure aimed squarely at kids that succeeds by hitting jokes and delivering a believable character arc. Echoing Titans’ story impetus of a…

  • Teen Titans Go! To The Movies

    August 3, 2018 - By 

    “More jokes!” After D.C. and Warner Bros’ ultra-sombre film debuts left them with box office egg on their faces, the cinematic DCU has been itching, ever gradually, closer to the light, well-received populism of the Marvel house style. Justice League’s most human moment was a Josh Whedon gag; Wonder Woman swung for idealism and fish-out-of-water larks; the trailer for James Wan’s Aquaman suggests a dopey beef-bro underwater odyssey, while Shazam!‘s leans hard on the comedy, and seems to work. The memo’s gone out: the sillier the better. By that metric, Teen Titans Go! To The Movies is D.C.’s best film yet.…

  • Deadpool 2

    May 16, 2018 - By 

    In the beefed up, more densely populated Deadpool 2, an expanded talent budget means Ryan Reynolds’ chattering ‘Merc with the Mouth’ gets to assemble his own super-team (named ‘X-Force’, because ‘X-Men’ is sexist). One of his recruits is Domino (a breezy Zazie Beetz), whose power is to be permanently in Fortune’s good books. She is effortlessly lucky: spinning cars whizz past her, guns in her face jam and a blustery day blows her parachute in just the right direction (prevailing winds turn out to be a not-minor plot point). In Reynolds’ rearguard mutant franchise, 20th Century Fox have found their own…

  • Wonder Woman

    June 5, 2017 - By 

    Diana, Princess of the Amazons, is here to save the world, or at least the DC Cinematic Universe. “They don’t deserve you”, coos her arch-nemesis, the war-mongering Aries, referring to the flaky humans Diana has abandoned Paradise to help. He may as well be speaking about the creative team at Warner Bros and DC Films, who have thus far battered and demoralised eager audiences with dour, cynical, wildly plotted movies. They don’t deserve Diana, but she’s here anyway. The 2017 blockbuster most destined to be damned by faint praise, Wonder Woman breaks from the DC pack by provoking a reaction…

  • Logan

    March 9, 2017 - By 

    Finally! Writer/director James Mangold (Walk The Line) has made up for the damp squib that was 2013’s The Wolverine, with a fantastic final outing for Hugh Jackman that transcends the usual superhero formula and delves into a much darker, violent and more vulnerable, nearly dystopian world. Unlike the many other movies of this genre, Logan gives the viewer a feeling of realism, substance and heart, of the type that has never been seen in the rest of the Marvel or DC worlds, making for an instant classic. In the year 2029, mutants are all but a thing of the past,…