Shameless Self Expression

An odd couple is formed when circumstances force gruff cop Vic (Dave Bautista) to take an Uber driven by nerdy Stu (Kumail Nanjiani) in order to track down the killer (Iko Uwais) of his partner (a thankfully brief Karen Gillan). All Stu wants is to get the hell over to his drunk and frankly not very nice crush’s (Betty Gilpin) place to have sex, and now he’s stuck playing chauffeur on a police operation. Mira Sorvino plays Vic’s senior officer, whilst Natalie Morales is Vic’s daughter. Jimmy Tatro plays an obnoxious ‘dude bro’ co-worker at Stu’s day job at a sporting goods store.   One of the better buddy cop/odd couple action comedies of late (faint praise?), this 2019 film from director Michael Dowse (the OK sports comedy “Goon” ) and screenwriter Tripper Clancy (co-writer of a couple of German films with Til Schweiger) gets a lot of help from the likeable and funny Kumail Nanjiani. Proving that he can at least eek out two films using his basic awkward milquetoast schtick af...

Set in 1840s London, Boris Karloff plays a kindly and well-meaning surgeon who loathes the pain his surgeries cause patients in the pre-anaesthesia era. He starts to experiment on himself with an early attempt at anaesthesia, with disastrous results. Karloff gets addicted to the chemicals he’s using, and falls in with dastardly slum denizens Black Ben (Francis De Wolff) and the murderous Resurrection Joe (Christopher Lee). This fiendish and greedy duo are in the business of killing and selling corpses and need someone in the medical profession to be able to sign the death certificates to profit from their victims (though the deadly Resurrection Joe also seems to just enjoy killing people for the sake of it). So they blackmail poor Karloff. Betta St. John and Francis Matthews play the requisite young lovers, the latter playing Karloff’s concerned son. Desmond Llewellyn can briefly be seen observing one of Karloff’s painful surgeries.   Perhaps if I’d seen this 1958 variation on ...

Set in the 1930s, Laurence Fishburne is ambitious African-American gangster Ellsworth ‘Bumpy’ Johnson, whose control of the Harlem numbers racket is being threatened by white mobster Dutch Schultz (Tim Roth), and he’s utterly ruthless in that pursuit. This is in somewhat contrast to Lucky Luciano (Andy Garcia), a more business-like crime boss who doesn’t much care for Schultz. Cicely Tyson plays a powerful gangster monikered ‘Queen’, who was once Bumpy’s employer. Vanessa Williams is the nice girl Francine, who falls for Bumpy, despite his criminal misdeeds, whilst Chi McBride plays Bumpy’s loyal cousin and best friend. William Atherton turns up as DA Thomas Dewey.   Laurence Fishburne played gangster ‘Bumpy’ Johnson in Francis Ford Coppola’s rather dull “The Cotton Club” back in 1984. Here he was playing the role once again in this 1997 film from director Bill Duke (Best known by me as an actor in 80s action films like “Commando” and “Predator” ). Scripted by Chris Brancato ...

A bunch of singing cats introduce themselves as they vie for some kind of honour bestowed upon them by a revered, geriatric cat named Old Deuteronomy (Dame Judi Dench, in a role originated by Brian Blessed, of all people). Meanwhile, the dastardly Macavity (Idris Elba) is lurking about trying to get an edge in the competition by kidnapping his rivals. Other cats on show include weepy Grizabella (Jennifer Hudson), comical and portly Bustopher Jones (James Corden), chubby Jennyanydots (Rebel Wilson), Rum Tum Tugger (Jason Derulo), theatre ham Gus the Theatre Cat (Sir Ian McKellen), Growltiger (Ray Winstone), and the vixen-ish Bombalurina (Taylor Swift), an associate (or moll?) of Macavity. Our audience surrogate of-sorts is newcomer Victoria (Francesca Hayward), who gets welcomed into this weird little society by Munkustrap (Robbie Fairchild).   Y’all know I don’t like movie musicals, hell the only stage musical I’ve ever seen is the infamous flop “Starlight Express” (Zero memor...

Paul Massie stars as Dr. Jekyll, a recluse who is obsessed with experimenting with the dark side of human nature. He wants to see if there’s a way to separate the good and bad sides of ourselves, and wonders whether or not eradicating one’s darker side is actually a  good  thing. It’s a dangerous territory he’s wading in, and his experiments do lead to bringing out his darker side, a completely different personality named Mr. Hyde. Where Jekyll is a dull, pasty-faced recluse, Hyde is the dashingly handsome life of the party. Hyde also allows Jekyll to eventually indulge his darker urges free of restraint, including plotting revenge on his duplicitous, frequently-in-debt best friend Paul Allen (Christopher Lee) and cheating wife Kitty (Dawn Addams). Jekyll still lurks inside of the same body that contains Hyde, but will he ever want to suppress his evil side or is he too far gone for that? Francis De Wolff appears late as a Scotland Yard detective. With a cast that includes C...

  Cops (Denzel Washington, his partner Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Emergency Services guy Willem Dafoe) are pitted against master robber Clive Owen and his crew, who have stormed a Manhattan bank and are holding hostages but don’t entirely work from the usual bank robbing manual. Jodie Foster (at her iciest) is somewhere in the middle, as an extremely well-connected ‘fixer’. She has been hired by the wealthy and powerful bank head honcho (Christopher Plummer), to find out what the robbers want, and more importantly to retrieve something important of his that is stored inside the bank. Meanwhile, detective police Washington – a skilled hostage negotiator – is also currently being investigated by Internal Affairs over some missing money on a previous case.   Well-respected filmmaker Spike Lee (whose best film is still “Malcolm X” by a landslide) gets his head out of his own butt and proves that he can make a piece of entertainment, putting the social commentary in the background ...

Looking for his missing brother, Mark Eden heads to Craxton Lodge in Graymarsh, where he is politely greeted by its owner (Christopher Lee), who says he’s never heard of the brother. Nonetheless, he cordially invites him to stick around for at least the night, and he quickly hits it off with Lee’s niece (Virginia Wetherell). However, it’s not long before Eden starts to suspect that there’s something not quite right at Craxton Lodge. This is especially so when he starts to have nightmares about a witch (a blue-skinned Barbara Steele, though some seem to think she looks  green ), who centuries ago was burned at the stake and swore revenge on her persecutors. The very same incident that the village of Greymarsh is currently celebrating the anniversary of. Oh my, what on earth has our hero gotten himself into? Boris Karloff plays a wheelchair-bound professor who is currently writing a book about witchcraft, and who is eager to show off his collection of torture devices (!). Michael Gou...

It’s the Blitz in London during WWII, and three young orphans (Roy Snart, Ian Weighill, and Cindy O’Callaghan) are put in the reluctant (and temporary) care of single, middle-aged eccentric Eglantine Price (Angela Lansbury). Prim and proper but somewhat daffy, Miss Price is something of an apprentice witch, having been taking a course in witchcraft by correspondence (As a way to help in the war effort, of course). So far she’s managed to get pretty good at turning people into rabbits. So that’s, er…something. She hadn’t had any interest in finding a man (something the locals in her town seem to find strange), let alone having children in her plans. Now all of a sudden, for the foreseeable future Miss Price has three young charges in her care, as they go on a journey in search of the missing piece of a magical incantation from a spell book. Their mode of transport for this expedition? A flying bed, with a magical navigational bedknob, of course. First they go in search of the rather sho...

Christmas time at Hawthorne College, where sorority sisters at Mu Kappa Epsilon are rallying around one of their own (Imogen Poots), whose rape by a frat boy wasn’t treated with any seriousness by authorities at all. After the girls perform a pointed skit about date rape at an annual Christmas show on campus, the girls all start getting nasty social media messages from an unknown source. And then the girls start to go missing one by one. Cary Elwes plays a literature professor who gets on the wrong side of feminist students, whilst Caleb Eberhardt plays the socially awkward nice guy whom Poots starts to have romantic feelings for.   Didn’t we already do this? Twice? And wasn’t one of those times in 2006? Well yes, and here we are doing it again 10+ years later with this 2019 film from director Sophia Takal (a writer-director and occasional actress) and her co-writer April Wolfe (no significant feature film credits until this). The best I can say for this is that it sucks slight...

A look at the fiasco that was the 2000 American Federal Election, an election circus that was partly exacerbated by tensions among the Cuban-American community over the then-Clinton Administration’s handling of the Elian Gonzalez refugee case. An election that would become a total disaster with hanging chads, MIA mayors, and an infamous recount, resulting in the eventual election of Luckiest Guy in America (albeit depending on your political persuasion), George Dubya Bush.   Although it’s a tad dry and probably more useful to Americans, this Billy Corben documentary from 2020 will likely still satisfy political nerds, of which I count myself one. It’s interesting viewing this the same year as an American election which Toddler-in-Chief Former President Trump tried to pass off as somewhat similarly fraudulent as the 2000 U.S. Federal Election. That crazy election is this documentary’s subject. A documentary that’ll give you ‘Hanging Chads’ (Only in America can you get Hanging, P...

  Artist Jean Simmons is about to marry dull but thoroughly decent doctor James Donald, when her smoothie cad ex-boyfriend David Farrar (a former flyboy and current smuggler) comes waltzing back in her life. She finds herself unable to resist him and leaves a stable life with Donald for the clearly unscrupulous Farrar. Soon they are even married. Sadly for Simmons, once Farrar finds out that she’s a) pregnant, and b) doesn’t have quite as much money as he’d assumed, he drops her like a hot potato. The right utter bastard. Then out of the blue Simmons receives word that Farrar has died under mysterious circumstances. After a while, she has moved on and gotten back together with Donald, leaving the whole sordid mess behind her. And then Farrar turns up very well not dead and with an extortion plan in tow as he sets about making things very uncomfortable for Simmons. Madeleine Lebeau and Herbert Lom play a couple of Farrar’s underworld acquaintances, Bernard Lee turns up as a polic...