Jonathan Crocker

Vin Diesel is a geek. He loves Dungeons & Dragons. He’s a World Of Warcraft fanatic. And sci-fi is his favourite genre. The bald behemoth dropped out of videogame adap Hitman to star in this dystopian thriller, his first role since he sprouted hair and – even more amazingly – acting chops in 2006′s courtroom drama Find Me Guilty. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 9% [?]

Oh brother, where art thou? Ben Affleck blazes back triumphant with a dark, deadly crime mystery…

“Gobble, gobble.” Two magic words that saw Ben Affleck’s credibility dry up like camel’s piss in the desert. That was Gigli. That was five years ago. Now it’s time to make the critics eat it. After seemingly punching the self-destruct button on his career, Affleck has returned with a brooding, doomy directorial debut of startling courage and bristling moral complexity. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 3% [?]

Pudding. Love. Adam Sandler. Three things you won’t find in director Paul Thomas Anderson’s first film since 2002′s Punch-Drunk Love. Shuddering with biblical sound and fury, clocking in at nearly three hours and centred by a seismic performance from Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood is something else. Something else entirely. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 4% [?]

Smuggling in a fraught, mythic tale of destiny and blood ties under the old-fashioned clothing of a ’70s-style crime drama, writer/director James Gray‘s first film in seven years broods with dark, tantalising subtleties.

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Popularity: 4% [?]

A vision gone mad for a world gone mad? More coherent and less grandiose than his infamous Cannes rough-cut, Richard Kelly‘s Southland Tales is still a mess – but what a mess. Like his genre-bending cult debut Donnie Darko, it’s an end-of-days pulp-prophesy. But this time, political steamrollers personal as terrorists, politicians, porn stars, actors, singers, soldiers and scientists collide in a paranoid fantasy of dystopian America the day after tomorrow. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 3% [?]

As biopic movie-meat, this extraordinary true story aches with subtext: ’70s Harlem druglord, Frank Lucas built an empire via killer market force – smuggling low-cost, high-impact heroin right through the fog of the Vietnam war. It’s worth epic treatment, all 157 minutes of it. And, right from the title, Ridley Scott guns for nothing less than the twenty-first century’s first great crime saga: the American dream re-cut as a New York dope opera. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 4% [?]

Down, down, down… Through the war-wounds of Fascist Spain, through ovarian entrances, through womb corridors, through Freudian angst, Gothic art, insect-fear, body horror, religious iconography, wicked slashes of Bunuelian humour… through the looking glass into Guillermo del Toro‘s psyche itself. His most personal film, the one he’s wanted to make from the beginning, Pan’s Labyrinth brings the inside out with unforgettable force. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 3% [?]

Guns, knives, torture, revenge, pain, death… and love. You can’t beat Korean cinema when it comes to belching blood right from the heart. Aiming to max-out Old Boy’s overkill brutality, writer/director Kim Ji-woon ditches the measured chills of superb horror A Tale Of Two Sisters in favour of slicked-up ultra-violence. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 3% [?]

A teen time-travel mess that thinks it’s a dark thriller, The Butterfly Effect is so head-slappingly silly you may even enjoy it. Ashton Kutcher stars as Evan, a boy who discovers he can journey back into his troubled childhood and change the future for himself and his friends. Problem is, every alternative reality changes something for the worse. So he keeps going back – again and again. Result? Lobotomised entertainment that’s dark, violent, and hilariously dumb. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 8% [?]