Jonathan Crocker

“I like baseball, movies, good clothes, fast cars and you. What else do you need to know?”

What, indeed? The short, fast life of ’30s American gangster John Dillinger is legend: he robbed banks that robbed the public, becoming a media sensation, a Depression-era folk hero and the first Public Enemy Number One of J Edgar Hoover’s new FBI.

After breaking out of every jail that held him, he was chased across America by G-man Melvin Purvis and at last famously shot dead by police outside the Biograph cinema in Chicago after watching a Clark Gable crime flick.

We know this. Michael Mann knows this. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 5% [?]

1. Statham has action in his blood

His father was a boxer and a gymnast (and taught his son both). His brother loved martial arts (and used little Jason as his personal punch-bag). Growing up, Statham also learned the family business, working as a fast-talking London street trader.

2. Statham has a talent

When he was a kid, Statham’s parents took him on holiday to Miami. Wowed by a diver on the high board, he began diving aged 13. Inside a year, Statham was on the British team. He competed for 12 years, placed third in Olympic trials on three occasions and ranked 12^th in the world on the springboard. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 17% [?]

It’s like Memento. Only drunk. In Vegas. On a stag-do. Three men wake up in a ransacked hotel suite. One of them is naked from the waist down. One of them is missing a tooth. One of them is wearing a hospital bracelet. None of them can remember what the hell happened. Apart from the fact there were four of them the night before. Dude, where’s my groom? Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 5% [?]

Eyes wide open for six fascinating black bore-holes into David Lynch’s cinematic awakening. Dreams and reality, fears and desires, sex and death, innocence and adulthood… It’s all here. These short films, made as an avant garde art-student are pupating nightmare-glimpses of what would emerge from his amazing surrealist feature debut Eraserhead. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 10% [?]

“I walked out of The Matrix and I was thinking, ‘What kind of science fiction movie can people make now?’” recalls Darren Aronofsky. “The Wachowskis took all the great sci-fi ideas of the 20th century and rolled them into a delicious pop culture sandwich that everyone on the planet devoured.” To celebrate the 10-year anniversary of the most influential movie in modern sci-fi, we reveal the 12 movies and books that inspired it. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 15% [?]

Goodbye cake and balloons. Hello suicide and paedogeddon. Probably the worst birthday party of the 20th century, Danish bad-boy Thomas Vinterberg’s riveting family-meltdown drama is also the first, truest and best Dogma 95 film ever made.

Exploding inside a country inn, it sees various spouses, relations and friends gathered to celebrate patriarch Helge’s 60th. But the veneer of civility shatters like glass as the families deepest, darkest secrets spew out onto the table. Chekhov, Ibsen and Bergman would have eaten it up. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 6% [?]

Or: how Japan learned to stop worrying and love the bomb. Restored, recut and re-released with a full 40 extra minutes to celebrate a 50th birthday, Godzilla shrugs off its politically neutered US edit to stomp tall once more: a thirty-storey atomic metaphor as urgent, fraught and ambiguous as ever. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 15% [?]

One last film. One last fight. One last time. In a new century when Batman begins and Bond reboots, Stallone plants his feet firmly on the canvas and reaches all the way back to 1976. Like the no-star, low-budget blockbuster that beat All The President’s Men at the Oscars, Rocky Balboa is pure Cinderella story: a small, personal humanist drama boasting a cast of nobodies and a central star with the odds racked against him. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 8% [?]

1. Spider-Man – Karma Sutra Kiss

Rush of blood to the head… Spidey (Tobey Maguire) drops in for a dangling, lingering upside-down kiss with a rain-soaked MJ (Kirsten Dunst). Call it breathlessly romantic. “I was hanging upside down, it was five in the morning, rain was going up my nose or down my nose,” remembers Maguire. “Then when she lifted the mask up, the mask was sitting on my nose so I couldn’t breathe through my nose. She was kissing my mouth, so I couldn’t breathe through my mouth. And there’s no other places to breathe from! Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 10% [?]

Mark Wahlberg is an Oscar-nominated actor. But let’s be specific about that: he’s an Oscar-nominated supporting actor. Cast in a quality ensemble, he soars (see Boogie Nights, Three Kings, The Departed). He just can’t carry a movie in a bucket (don’t see Shooter, Rock Star, The Happening). Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 5% [?]