In the absence of a (decent) feel-good action caper in 2005 – Spielberg turning his efforts to darker pastures, and Batman – although superb – was hardly ‘cheery’ was he? – it seems the mantle of high-octane adventure, comic partnerships, and glib one-liners fell to the shoulders of one man and his dog; i.e. the irrepressible Wallace & Gromit. Not that Wallace & Gromit were new to adventures, see… their previous outings saw them foil an evil criminal (penguin) mastermind; [...]

There’s been a fuck up. It’s 1979; the Vietnam war is over and the Cold War is heating up, and Corporal Rudy Spruance (Jason Biggs) is dropped off in mysterious Military Base in Qangattarsa, Greenland rather than the sun-kissed beaches of Hawaii. There, he is referred to only as ‘Martin Pederson’. Rudy’s attempts to correct this error are quickly shot down as Corporal Lane Woolrap (Jeremy Northam) has plans for ‘Pederson’; to manufacture a propagandist newspaper ‘The Harpoon’, but Rudy [...]

To some people (me particularly) Tim Burton’s other 2005 film, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory seemed to say: “Hey! Look everyone! We’ve remade Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory! removing all the things that made the original a classic; the drug-addled psychedelia, Gene Wilder’s spectacularly unhinged performance and the darker, malevolent tone; replacing them with an vacuous Studio lustre, uneventfully ticking off each scene as we went; providing no imagination or investment of our own!”. Thankfully Corpse Bride takes a [...]

Those guys out in the far East eh? They’re way ahead over there, what with their cars, their computers, their cigarette-per-person ratio, and most definitely, their films. While Western cinema has been shrugging its creative shoulders and piling-out re-make after re-make, big-budget epic war yarn after big-budget epic war yarn, Asian cinema have been making some of the most exciting, extreme, bizarre and compelling films in the world. The success of the East-Asian horror, i.e.; Ring, Dark Water, The Eye, [...]