Throne of Blood
The Scottish Play goes to Japan in this reimagining of Macbeth from Akira Kurosawa. Is that a samurai sword I see before me? Toshiro Mifune gives an intense lead performance […]
Category Archives: Reviews
Eraser
John Krueger (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is an eraser who helps fake the deaths of people who need to be forgotten, or something. When he’s charged with protecting (not erasing) Lee Cullen […]
The Last Stand
This is the 2013 Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, not the X-Men film with which it shares a name and magnet-based prison van escape sequence. Arnie’s post-gubernatorial comeback has a few key ingredients […]
Been So Long: My Life and Music
The autobiography of Jefferson Airplane guitarist Jorma Kaukonen is now out in paperback, a book so beautiful it quite literally attracts butterflies. Been So Long charts the musician’s journey from […]
Starter for 10
Pencil-necked pushover Brian (James McAvoy) is a quiz-obsessed working class kid whose dreams come true when he gets on Bristol’s University Challenge team and meets not one but two generic […]
Red Heat
A Russian officer (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and a Chicago cop (Jim Belushi) team up to bring down a drug kingpin (Ed O’Ross) in 1988’s Red Heat. There are parallels with Rocky […]
Shivers
All this business with Dominic Cummings has got me thinking about David Cronenberg’s Shivers. Movies about viruses were spreading in the early ’70s (George A. Romero’s The Crazies and Robert […]
On iPlayer: Paint Your Wagon
Clint Eastwood heads westward in 1969 musical Paint Your Wagon AKA Purty Harry. In a possible attempt to rebottle the success of Oklahoma!, Lerner and Loewe’s (My Fair Lady) musical […]
The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires
As these are “unprecedented times” (by which I mean a year without Eurovision), here’s a book review: the new novel by the great horror writer Grady Hendrix, in which a […]
Collateral Damage
Arnold Schwarzenegger ends the war on drugs and starts the war on terror in this largely forgotten effort from 2002, in which a firefighter (Schwarzenegger) uses his CIA connections (?) […]
Screen Goblin 