Barbenheimer, zombies and the power of uncontrollable marketing
What’s the secret to the Barbenheimer hype?
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So, Avatar, finally. I SEE you.
I first saw Avatar 13 years and three days ago and never went back. Nobody talks about it. It raked in huge amounts of cash, but it hardly made the zeitgeist. Nobody wanted four sequels. It was just James Cameron wasting his career on a disappointing pet project. But – this film is a blast.
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TOP Doctor Who stories for Hallowe’en!
It’s that time of year again – when the nights draw in, the leaves fall, and pumpkins are mercilessly scooped out and carved up for the entertainment of children young and old. It’s also the time of year I start making a mental list of all the seasonally-appropriate Doctor Who episodes to recommend to anyone who’ll listen. Doctor Who has never …
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Dumb and Dumber To
A joyous return to form after the – frankly pretty boring – misfire that was Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd.
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Raiders of the Lost Shark
There is a great poster for this ‘film’, and it’s a great title. But it lives and dies on the promise of those two things, and completely wastes them.
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Antebellum
I can see why the subject matter might put people off. We’ve got yet another race-based, popcorn dissection of social ills, and the potentially frivolous treatment of a period of history that still stings like a motherfucker for Black Americans and whites alike.
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Peninsula
Is this better than Train to Busan? No, probably not, but it’s close in its own way. It’s better than Seoul Station, which was OK, but Peninsula is a must-see.
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Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters
A feature-length, non-theatrical anime from Toho and Netflix, which forms the first chapter of a series in three parts. This was good, mostly. The CGI-hybrid style of animation was equal parts stunning and distracting. It’s obviously computer-rendered, but shaded in a way that simulates the flat look of hand-drawn. It can sometimes look weirdly cheap-looking, to my eyes at least, …
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Unhinged
Pure popcorn thriller, despite its many, many attempts to appear otherwise.
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The Ninja Squad
There’s no real need to make pastiche good/bad movies when bad movies like The Ninja Squad are so, so good.
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Nerve
An extremely stylish and exuberant take on the money-for-dares/dangerous game narrative, buoyed by a brilliant, catchy soundtrack, and propelled along by beautiful neon colours.
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Hard to be a God Music video – Aleksei German Vs. Grant Stevens
A mash-up of Russian arthouse and 80s rock.
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The Limehouse Golem
In a nutshell: not just a bunch of stuff you’ve seen before in every other dark Victorian London-set mystery tale.
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VHS Nasty (documentary)
It looks so bad I almost wanted to design them a few pop-up banners to place in the background for a more professional look.
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One Million Years B.C.
The joke about this film was always that, historically, humans meeting dinosaurs and Raquel Welch’s salon-perfect hairdo are both naively inaccurate. Which kind of misses the point. This is a fantasy romp.
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I’m Thinking of Ending Things
Meticulously-constructed, actors deploying their craft with expert precision, and never once pandering to the idea that the audience requires spoonfeeding. These are the hallmarks of this film.
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