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Chloe (DVD Review)
 Atom Egoyan’s remake of French thriller Nathalie stars Julianne Moore as a suspicious wife who goes to extreme lengths to test her husband’s (Liam Neeson) fidelity...
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The Office: An American Workplace (DVD Review)
 Critics were poised and ready to condemn those cheeky Americans for poaching the very British BBC hit The Office. To everyone’s surprise, this US...
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True Blood Season 2 (DVD Review)
 Disappointing HBO series. HBO have set the bar pretty high with the likes of The Sopranos and The Wire in recent years and all though much hyped the True Blood series fails to impress...
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S.N.U.B (DVD Review)
 The actor’s elephant graveyard, where “Doctors” extras come to die. Badly… This is an offensively poor attempt at a post-apocalyptic, mutant zombie horror, where some random...
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30 Rock Season 3 (DVD Review)
 With its fourth season currently airing and a fifth season renewed, 30 Rock shows no sign of slowing down. Awards success has also greeted its doorstep, receiving the Emmy...
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Glorious 39 (DVD Review)
 Stephen Poliakoff’s first cinema release in a decade proves to be a bit of a lacklustre affair. The ingredients are there for a great film but things don’t quite fit together. Aspiring actress Anne...
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Dear John Cinema Review (DVD Review)
 Dear John is an enjoyable romantic drama which has an old fashioned wartime romance feel about it. The last adaptation from a Nicolas Sparks novel, The Notebook, was a commercial...
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No One knows about Persian Cats (DVD Review)
 Rather like the documentary Afghan Star from last year, this riveting piece of drama provides a great service to western audiences: it shows us the...
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The Day Of The Triffids (DVD Review)
 The Beeb’s occasional romps into dramatic recreations of classic novels, plays and musical extravaganzas seldom turn up real duffers. After all, for all of the Corporation’s understated...
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On the Blind Side (Cinema Review)
 To say I was moved by On the Blind Side would be an understatement. The Brigadier felt the same. We could hardly move from our seats at the end of the film. On the Blind Side stars...
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Dead Man Running (DVD Review)
 Another gun-toting cockney-gangster film you say? Well yes, but it’s a goodun. Even mobster loan sharks are feeling the pinch of the credit-crunch in this gritty yet comedic day in the life film...
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Ninja (DVD Review)
 Plot Spoiler: Its rubbish. ‘nuff said. This film is diabolical in every aspect; I had to refrain from turning it off and flushing it down the toilet after less than five minutes viewing, and only...
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The Deal (DVD Review)
 One of these days, William H Macy will be recognised for the truly phenomenal acting talent that he is. ‘The Deal’ is his most recent ouevre, which he adapted in league with its director...
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Father of my Children (Cinema Review)
 Rambling drama that fades into insignificance.
The movie opens with Gregoire Canvel (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing), a film producer, who on the surface has a very idyllic little life; wife, great...
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The Lovely Bones (Cinema Review)
 There have been two strands to Peter Jackson’s film-making. The most obvious is his bravura directing. The Lord of the Rings trilogy and King Kong showed a huge and fantastic visual...
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Mad Monster Party (DVD Review)
 Classic 1967 remastered animated flick. One for the kids.
Baron Von Frankenstein has decided to retire and so organises a party at his castle for all his creations. So the movie starts...
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Stan Helsing (DVD Review)
 Lame spoof horror has a few laughs but lobotomy of some sorts required to enjoy.
The movie has been marketed as a film for lovers of the Scary Movie series. But although Scary...
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Crazy Heart (Cinema Review)
 Hard-drinking, chain smoking, uber-grizzled country singer Bad Blake (Jeff Bridges) makes his way from venue to crumby venue, works with pick-up bands, enjoys the attentions of the...
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The Wolfman (Cinema Review)
 Silly creature on the prowl movie which lacks any real bite. Lawrence Talbot (Benicio Del Toro) is contacted by his brother’s fiancée Gwen Conliffe (Emily Blunt) after her...
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No Holds Bard (DVD Review)
 As a Scot living in England, I am only too aware of the taunts to which I leave myself open. Ironically, they come from north of the Border and not from the English side! In viewing...
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In the Electric Mist (DVD Review)
 Run of the mill drama mystery starring Tommy Lee Jones.
The action is set in the Deep South where Dave Robicheaux is a recovering alcoholic cop who also runs a small fishing bait shop...
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Precious: based on the novel Push by Sapphire (Cinema Review)
 Every so often American independent cinema produces a small gem of a movie which would not have had a chance of being taken on by the Hollywood...
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Exam (Cinema Review)
 It is hard to recommend this. It feels like a film school exercise which has been stretched far beyond its natural capacity to engage or entertain. The premise is this: eight young high-flyers...
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Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll (Cinema Review)
 This is how to make a rock bio-pic. From the first frames of Peter Blake’s pop art title sequence to the last frames of concert footage over the end credits, this movie is intelligent, engaging and...
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Nowhere Boy (Cinema Review)
 Learning of an artist’s early life does not necessarily reveal the source of their talent, but it is, nonetheless, interesting to fill in the biographical gaps. Most of us are probably only vaguely...
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Steve Coogan Live (DVD Review)
 While not wishing to sound like a cabbie, I do tend to bump into ‘famous’ people at airports, usually while sitting in Business Class lounges. In fact, I first met Steve Coogan at Gatwick...
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G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (DVD Review)
 The name of a movie can sometimes play a big part in whether someone will want to see it or not. Take Snake on Planes, great name awful movie. Not knowing much about the...
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Terminator Salvation - Directors Cut (DVD Review)
 This film is utterly outstanding. After the molten-bile inducing abomination that was T3: Rise Of The Cash Cow, I couldn’t help feeling some rage-scarred...
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Jason Manford Live at The Manchester Apollo (DVD Review)
 Despite being a product of the past five decades, which encompasses a comedy travelogue from Music Hall to popular TV and takes in...
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It’s not often that this can be said... we have been spoilt. Police fiction on television has been of the highest calibre imaginable. The Wire, Dexter and The Shield are Greek tragedy...
Nelson Mandela’s release from Robben Prison after nearly 26 years sets the scene for this biopic directed by Clint Eastwood. Based on the John Carlin book Playing the Enemy...
Below average yarn directed by Michael Winterbottom. Much has been made about the violence portrayed in Michael Winterbottom’s latest offering but ultimately it’s just not a great...
A little cheesy at times but overall mildly enjoyable.Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe who worked together on the excellent Gladiator try to bring some of the same qualities to the screen in...
Samantha Morton’s directorial debut deals with a small girl who is taken into care. Morton herself was brought up in foster care and you have to think that the film must have incorporated...
Clive Barker’s Dread finds three college students working on a film project which gets out of control.Loner Stephen (Jackson Rathbone), extroverted Quaid (Shaun Evans) and pretty...
The title could make a person think this is an allegory for overcoming heroin addiction, but it’s actually the latest animation extravaganza to hit the multiplexes. You’d perhaps...
There’s something deep in the British psyche that thinks - or hopes - that laughter drives out evil. The same impulse that printed Hitler’s picture inside wartime chamber-pots wonders...
There is a wonderful tradition, not just in Hollywood but also in major movie-making centres in other parts of the world, for producing costume dramas that can stand the test of time. The two hours...
Shockingly bad zombie nonsense. Donning the old back to the future cardboard 3D specs this was a typical case of expecting 3 dimensional images and ending up with a headache...
This film is absolutely brilliant. If you hate hoodies and do-naff wigga chavs, then you’ll love Harry Brown. Michael Caine plays Harry, an elderly, law-abiding citizen who lives in fear on a run...
Jeremy Piven takes a turd and makes it shine; The Goods is another reasonably comedic offering from Will Ferrell and Judd Apatow that follows a team of mercenary used car salesmen...
This thriller offers a heady mix of mental illness, war crimes, incarceration, grief, loss of identity and disgusting weather. In other words, a lot which is awful about being human. It is a movie...
Brave, territorial, boisterous, fun and even murderous, the most recent subjects of the BBC’s unparalleled Natural History Unit, ‘Banded Brothers: The...
British director Peter Strickland’s first feature is an accomplished folk story set in rural Romania.
The heroine Katalin Varga (Hilda Peter) finds herself banished from her village and having to leave...
Christian (Peter Marshall) is a grieving father of daughter Jesse who was found dead from an overdose. Soon after, Christian receives a parcel containing a pornographic video featuring...
Terrible kidnap plot saga which at 98 minutes long makes teeth extraction slightly more bearable.
In a nutshell a couple of ex-con chancers kidnap the daughter...
Watchable dark portrait of a tragic and lonely figure.
Gerard Johnson’s first feature is a moving study into the tragic existence of Tony (Peter Ferninando) living within the...
Having become hugely famous from writing his big novels, and having added considerably to his aristocrat’s wealth, the ageing Count Leo Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer) started to have...
This small scale but very impressive film is based on a somewhat autobiographical Christopher Isherwood novel. George is a middle-aged English professor at a small...
Nelson Mandela had a rare gift which enabled him to be the greatest politician of the modern era: a willingness to listen to and understand the fears of his oppressors. He learned...
Predictable yet OK movie that merges two different stories of survival.
One part of the narrative deals with the familiar story of rival gang life. El Casper/Willy (Edgar Flores) is a gang...
Pedro Almodóvar's latest film Broken Embraces may impress movie geeks but overall it’s a bit of a yawn.
The film opens with a middle aged blind man, who is slightly balding, end up...
A man is distraught after his wife tells him that’s she’s going leave him. Colin Diamond (Ray Winstone) has gone to pieces. His long term wife Liz (Joanne Whalley) is leaving him...
… or “the oh-so-tortured love lives of the well-heeled West Coast middle classes.” Writer-director Nancy Meyers has a saccharine view of life, as exemplified by the utterly...
Avatar is a stunning movie experience. Credit to James Cameron, a director with a fantastically broad vision and the tenacity to bring such a project to fruition. Visually the film is...
BBC Enterprises, the semi-privatised arm of the nation’s broadcasting corporation, knows when it is onto a ‘good thing’ and releasing entire TV series...
Star Trek goes back to the future to the younger days of Kirk, Spock and co.
Star Trek the American TV series was first broadcast in 1966. Over forty years later and Star Trek...
The Transformers posse are back.
After the huge box office smash of the first movie a Transformers sequel was always on the cards.
The first movie...