The average person gets to pick and choose their films. Critics, however, don’t have that luxury. Although, given the job description, many would concur that it’s a small price to pay. Any critic worth their salt walks into the cinema with an open mind, and emerges from the darkened room with a painfully honest assessment of their experience. Candidness is key to great criticism, and the brilliant writers of days gone by have previously rushed to support this theory. If you didn’t like a film that everybody else did – admit it.
Like you didn’t know already, Jared Leto has slipped into The Joker’s shoes for the upcoming DC villain piece Suicide Squad. His role has had about thirty to forty seconds of screen time in the form of teaser trailers so far, but it’s already been subject to considerable scrutiny and analysis from all corners of the globe.
There's nothing quite like comedy-horror movies. These are the kind of films that deliriously mash together two genres that belong on separate ends of the film spectrum. Yet strangely, when they're done right, these amalgamation movies can actually be a hell of a lot of fun.
A disturbing film isn't one that gleefully stands with its arms outstretched to embrace buckets of blood. A disturbing film is something else, something more - an experience that's undeniably unsettling whilst it plays out, but even more powerful in the lingering sting it leaves behind. A truly disturbing movie doesn't slap you around in your seat on first viewing - instead, it burrows its way into your brain and replays in your thoughts for weeks at a time afterwards.
How does a game with such an unbearably grim setting manage to be quite so captivating? Just check out the first trailer for Fallout 4 above, as it aptly demonstrates how this Bethesda series has managed to glue a global audiences' eyes to TV screens ever since the release of the first installment (which ran through MS-DOS) back in 1997.
As the old saying goes: If you don't succeed at first, then try, try again. This is a life lesson that Hollywood has taken aboard through years of film history - unfortunately to the public's detriment on more than one occasion. Reboots, sequels and remakes have become a recognizable stamp of American cinema, with Hollywood having been consistently preoccupied with rehashing dependable and bankable old ideas to keep the money rolling in - even if the subsequent critical reception has been lukewarm to say the least. Indeed, if you're a Hollywood producer, the old saying is probably something more like: If you do succeed at first, then try, try again anyway...
Rightly or wrongly, when the phrase "comic book movie" gets banded about, it's all too easy to conjure up memories of Superman powering through clear blue skies, Spider-Man springing his way between toppling skyscrapers, or Batman roaring his way through traffic in his devastating bat-mobile.
Every superhero ought to be memorable really. Any character dressed in a flamboyant costume with the ability to casually palm off numerous attackers at once should stick in the mind no matter what. Yet, several movies released during the past few decades have shown us these kind of spectacular characters stomping, whooshing and quipping on screen…and have curiously disappeared into thin air just moments later.
