How’s this for a delicious set-up; Simon Cowell-esque TV mogul Martin Tweedy (Hugh Grant at his most devilishly unctuous) is looking to spice up his Pop Idol-style programme American Dreamz. He finds sexy white trash girl Sally ” future Mrs Federline” Kendoo (Mandy Moore), desperate to win at all costs. He gets a call from a Cheney-lite puppet-master Vice-President (Willem Dafoe) and gets himself a Southern-fried moron of a President (obviously an entirely fictional creation), played by Dennis Quaid, as [...]

Borat Sagdiyev shuffles uncomfortably in his polyester grey (not black) suit, his eyes flitting around the camera before pleading: “Come see my movie film, if not success, I will be execute…” he promptly brandishes a worried yet innocent smile through a thick black moustache. Ostensibly, Sacha Baron Cohen; British comedian and creator of Borat, suffered a similar predicament in creating a big-screen version of his earnest yet deeply bigoted comedy Kazakhistani journalist Borat, or to give the film’s full title; [...]

Cult films, by their essence, tend to split folk into: “Whoa!” and “Whassatabout?” Brick changes nothing. Winner of the Special Jury Prize at Sundance 2005 for ‘originality of vision’, first time director and writer (or 2nd time if you count Evil Demon Golfball From Hell!!!, many won’t) Rian Johnson, through a decade of planning, scraping and saving, and eventually promoting, has whittled down Brick’s summary as: ‘A detective movie, set in a High School’. Despite this sounding like bread and [...]

There are two types of cinema audience; those looking for enlightenment and profundity from a flickering projector (the armchair romanticists) and those who take trivial pleasure in its degradation and disparagement (the dead-eyed pragmatists). M. Night Shyamalan knows this, and with his strewn of mainstream pictures he has unwittingly become the world’s leading enforcer in their separation. As many can guess, words like ‘separation’, ‘division’ or ‘half’ alongside words such as ‘audiences’ often summon tumultuous bowel movements from within The [...]

Man of Steel, Saviour of Earth, Protector of Mankind, Purveyor of Truth and Justice… Bryan Singer has been called many-a-name since his blazing directorial breakthrough The Usual Suspects but for many, Mr Singer will be more favourably remembered for putting the bite (and claws) back into comic-book movie adaptations. Not concerned with the campery and (crappery) of the latter Batman movies (that’s pre-Batman Begins, of course), Singer directed and co-wrote X-Men; less as an excuse for capes and special effects, [...]