Jonathan Crocker

Santa Claus Conquers The Martians (voted one of the worst movies ever). Mission To Mars (Rolling Stone: “DePalma has never made a dull movie. Until now.”). Red Planet (Variety: “Mission To Mars had style to burn compared to Red Planet”). Ghosts Of Mars (killed John Carpenter’s career for nine years). Doom (one of Time magazine’s 10 Worst Ever Videogame Adaps). Mars Attacks! (Budget: $100m. US box-office: $38m). Mars Needs Moms (the biggest box-office bomb of all time).

If history has taught us one lesson, it’s that if you’re going to make a movie about Mars, it had better star Arnold Schwarzenegger and a lady with three boobies. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 1% [?]

When asked to speak at a convention of cinema-owners in Las Vegas, the star of Big Daddy and Little Nicky addressed the crowd with the following words: “My name is Adam Sandler. I’m not particularly talented. I’m not particularly good-looking. And yet I’m a multi-millionaire.” Everyone laughed. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 10% [?]

Grim, bilious and maddeningly unsurprising, Tim Burton’s journey down the rabbit-hole Frankensteins together severed portions of two Alice books and Lewis Carroll’s epic poem Jabberwocky but ends up missing… what? Its “muchness”? Dodging a corset and a snooty suitor in the tedious intro, Alice (Defiance starlet Mia Wasikowska) is now a 19-year-old runaway bride who grapples with her own bodily changes and ill-fitting clothes before donning a suit of armour, decapitating a dragon and drinking its blood. This isn’t Uncle Walt’s Wonderland, for sure. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 3% [?]

Bobbing helplessly like a tiny cork, a 12-year-old boy drifts alone in the middle of the freezing Atlantic Ocean. With every minute, he’s dragged further and further away from his father, who’s also been caught in the rip current that’s left them treading water far out to sea.

Darkness falls. By now, the father can barely see the boy. He’s scared. His son has autism. Jellyfish begin to sting them both.

The man calls into the night: “To infinity…” Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 11% [?]

You might have heard about it already, but there’s some sort of international football tournament being played in South Africa this month. To celebrate England’s impending victory in the World Cup, we could have given you a list of the greatest football movies ever. But we’re better than that. So here, lacing up their boots in dreamland, are the movie characters who’d make our starting eleven. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 12% [?]

“I’ve seen the movie. It’s fantastic,” says Prince Of Persia’s star Jake Gyllenhaal. His director Mike Newell is even more pleased with it. “It’s colossal,” he nods. Their producer Jerry Bruckheimer backs them both up. “I thought it was brilliant,” he declares. “I loved it. It was just amazing.”

Typical. Hollywood types giving themselves a big pat on the back. Actually, no. They’re not talking about Prince Of Persia. They’re talking about the movie that everyone’s (still) talking about. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 3% [?]

1. Planet Earth
Shot on HD cameras and a £16 million budget, David Attenborough’s nature mega-doc might be Blu-ray’s most breathtaking visual experience: every colour, every hair, every tiny air-bubble and fish-scale leaps off the screen and hits your retinas like a drug.

2. Iron Man
Impossible to see where the CG starts and the live-action footage ends on Iron’s Man’s HD transfer. But it’s the lossless Dolby TrueHD 5.1 audio that really amazes: skip to Tony Stark’s first flight and feel your surround-sound ripple. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 10% [?]

Even she can’t believe it. “Is it? Wow…” Definitely. “Although on the other hand, it feels about 10.” More like five. “Yeah… But maybe five.” It’s definitely five, five years since Tilda Swinton last stared into an i-D camera. Back then, back in 2003, we celebrated her as Britain’s most unique icon of avant garde style: actress, artist, mother, model. The rest of the world has finally caught on. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 13% [?]

Big, fat flakes of white snow suddenly began tumbling down in the roasting afternoon heat of the Cannes film festival. It’s wasn’t global warming. It was just Cannes. Because here, you can do that. The festival is its own Field Of Dreams: if you pay for it, it will come. You want Christmas in May? You got it. You want Jim Carrey throwing snowballs after being brought in on a horse-drawn carriage? You got that too. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 12% [?]

The full story behind the most influential CG movie ever made…

Wyatt Earp was puzzled. Sitting on a horse in the middle of the hot Arizona desert, he scratched his huge handlebar moustache. He looked again the script that had been handed to him. “I’m reading this thing called Tron,” remembers Bruce Boxleitner, shooting made-for-TV Western I Married Wyatt Earp at the time. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 8% [?]