You know that a film is in trouble when the most entertaining thing about it is the company ident at the beginning, where the Minions are playing a version of Super Mario Bros. to tell us this is an Illumination production. Yes, we are back with a sequel to the Super Mario Bros. Movie from…
Tag: Adventure
The Magic Faraway Tree
Can we say all hail, Simon Farnaby? The performer and writer who started life in Horrible Histories and went on to co-write the BBC comedy Ghosts has taken the family film and breathed no life into it. Having co-written Paddington 2 and Wonka, he has now taken a beloved series of books by Enid Blyton,…
Project Hail Mary
Sci-fi is a hard genre to crack. They can be just silly, as proven with this year’s Mercy, or far too cerebral, as with Interstellar. Thankfully, writer Andy Weir has found that balance of science and fun. His previous film outing for one of his novels, The Martian, turned out to be Ridley Scott’s lightest…
Hoppers
Pixar has had a troubled time over the past few years. Where they were once the masters of pitch-perfect animations, with hit after hit, they have fallen to the side. Not saying the quality hasn’t been there, but the storytelling has been lacking. Movies like Elemental and Elio just haven’t connected with audiences, and so…
Send Help
If there is one thing that you can guarantee with a Sam Raimi film, it’s that it’s going to be tons of fun. The director of The Evil Dead know what an audience wants when going to the cinema. Something that doesn’t take itself too seriously, some interesting visuals and a film that zips along…
Anaconda
How do you reboot a series that was so bad, it was almost a parody of itself? You re-imagine it into a comedy-adventure. That is what has happened to Anaconda, the 1997 action monster movie starring Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube, and an awful performance by Jon Voight. Instead of going for a remake, you approach…
Avatar: Fire And Ash
There aren’t many film franchises where I could say I don’t care. Some are bad but bearable, while others worsen progressively. Still, James Cameron’s Avatar films just don’t do anything for me, to the point that even though cinema is going through a terrible patch at the moment, I want the third entry, Fire and…
The Running Man
At the height of his career, Arnold Schwarzenegger starred in a sci-fi action movie called The Running Man, which was based on a story by Richard Bachman, who turned out to be Stephen King. It was a pale imitation of the original story, and so King decided to withhold his name from the material. Now,…
Now You See Me: Now You Don’t
Back in 2013, a starry-stacked heist movie involving magicians appeared without much fanfare, even though it included big names like Michael Caine. Then the completely forgettable sequel came out, with Daniel Radcliffe as the villain, and no one even remembers it being released. So it’s astounding to see that a third film has escaped and…
Predator: Badlands
The Predator franchise has been diminishing ever since the alien decided to take on Arnold Schwarzenegger back in 1987. That is, until writer and director Dan Trachtenberg came on board with his 2022 film, Prey. Earlier this year, he gave us the animated Predator: Killer of Killers, and now he takes the story to a…
Tron: Ares
Back in 1982, Tron took cinema to a whole new dimension. The first film to use computer-generated effects was a marvel to behold, as we were taken from the real world into the land of video games, where light cycles raced around a grid, even though the computer they used had only 2 MB of…
The Fantastic Four: First Steps
Of all the Marvel creations, the Fantastic Four have had the rockiest time with film versions. There were the two from the early 2000s, and the disastrous 2015 version (and let’s not forget Roger Corman’s unreleased and very cheap version. Now, Marvel Studios has the rights back and has given us their first adventure in…
Stu Loves Film 