There’s something weirdly meta and unsettling about sitting in a room as a film critic watching a movie about a fiendishly pompous and self-centred critic, in this case a theatre scribe. In Anand Tucker’s The Critic, Sir Ian McKellen’s gleefully malevolent performance as London theatre critic James Erskine is the highlight of an uneven film. With his notorious poison pen,
Read moreThe Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies is the final instalment in the ludicrously inflated Hobbit trilogy, a series that has vividly exposed many of director Peter Jackson’s filmmaking flaws particularly his long-winded story-telling and poor character development. The first Hobbit film, An Unexpected Journey was noisy, silly, featured too many embarrassing attempts at comedy and even had a
Read moreThe film adaptations of Marvel’s X-Men Comics, which feature super-powered mutants or X-Men led by Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart) battling super-villain Magneto (Ian McKellan) and fearful, prejudiced “normal” humans, began in startling fashion in 2000. With 2006’s disappointing X-Men: The Last Stand and 2009’s clunky spin-off X-Men Origins: Wolverine, though, the franchise seemed to be in very poor shape, at
Read moreThe first Hobbit film, An Unexpected Journey was a loud, ugly overlong mess full of ridiculous dwarf sing-a-longs, tedious computer-generated battle sequences and interminable scenes of dwarves traipsing through the forest. It also featured characters suspiciously shoehorned into the story from other sources such as The Lord of the Rings. Lacking subtlety, emotional depth and the simple, pastoral charm of
Read moreThe Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, the first in Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy, is easily the most anticipated film of the year. The film’s arrival has, however, been preceded by several controversies not the least of which were accusations of animal cruelty on the set, something Peter Jackson has vehemently denied. Controversy surrounding the film itself began with the fact that
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