Dull

Dir: Andrew Dominik. Starring: Ana de Armas, Julianne Nicholson, Adrian Brody, Bobby Cannavale. 18, 165 minutesNever mind the diamonds. I’ll tell you who isn’t a girl’s best friend: Andrew Dominik, the writer-director of Blonde, a merciless, dull, over-long riff on Marilyn Monroe. Across its lengthy running time, the Hollywood star has a time of it. She is nearly drowned by her mother. Raped at an audition. Forced into an abortion. Harangued by the unborn foetus she’s about to abort. Attacked by a husband she calls…

The one thing to know about dreams is that they are not real. So when things start looking a bit too beautiful, too surreal, too dreamy, the human mind naturally distances it from reality. Now I am all for watching stunning visuals, pretty frocks, gorgeous film stars on screen but it comes at the cost of believability. And sorry, but I don't buy Daisy Edgar-Jones, in all her cute outfits, perfect hair, and idyllic home, trying to sell me abject poverty, abandonment, trauma and childhood abuse. (Also read: Beast movie…

If there’s one thing people haven’t been interested in during the age of COVID, it’s movies and TV shows revolving around viral outbreaks. Sure, Stephen Soderbergh’s Contagion gained a new lease of life during the first wave, but everything from Songbird to Locked Down has been viewed with derision, with last year’s The Survivalist also falling into a similar camp. Jonathan Rhys Meyers and John Malkovich take top billing in the action thriller that resolutely failed to read the room by…

Can you imagine a future where your daily commute is filled with electric vehicles zooming past you with fresh, crisp air coming through the windows? For now, we are sitting at stop lights, rolling the windows up because it’s better to breathe the AC than the toxic fumes from the vehicles around us. But what if I told you that a future with electric vehicles could also do the unthinkable: slow a recession? We have already seen it several times in our lifetime – oil and gas prices spiking so high that even…

via Saban Films Henry Cavill remains a hugely popular star, with the success of Netflix’s The Witcher keeping him in the public eye, even if Warner Bros. continue to ignore the fans that have been demanding his return as Superman for years. Despite his status, handsome visage, and chiseled frame, though, movies like The Night Hunter are part of the reason why the actor has never really been viewed as a viable action star. Sure, Geralt of Rivia can swing a sword with the best of them and he’s a dab hand at…

It’s perfectly possible to separate the art from the artist. Jimmy Page’s behaviour does not render the Led Zeppelin catalogue unlistenable; cinemas are now showing a film celebrating the life of Elvis, which rather glosses over the fact that Priscilla Beaulieu became his girlfriend when she was 14, but the music still sounds spectacular.Jeff Beck’s collaboration with Johnny Depp, though, is an odd case. Partly because while a British court decided Depp had beaten his now ex-wife, Amber Heard, he then won his case on the…

The Man from Toronto, a macho action romp starring Kevin Hart and Woody Harrelson, is yet another illustrative example of the Covid shockwave still rippling through the movie industry. It was originally slated for a theatrical release by Sony in November 2020, then faced pandemic production delays, then was acquired by Netflix and pushed to this weekend.The unceremonious streaming dump makes sense. Netflix has, arguably to its own detriment, cornered the market on big-budget throwaway films, and The Man from Toronto, from…

via Sony The horror genre has cannibalized itself to such an extent that you’d be hard-pressed to find any notable movie that hasn’t been remade or rebooted at least once, and that even includes titles that weren’t particularly successful the first time around. The Stepfather only made $2.5 million at the box office in 1987, so the cult favorite was fair game for a do-over. Nelson McCormick followed up his reinvention of Prom Night by tackling another reheated property, which came bearing a cast full of…