Because Everybody Else Has One

This is probably the "biggie" of the week. It's a weird one, though. Some reviewers absolutely love it. Some hate it. Me, I'm somewhere in the middle. This review is also up on Channel 24 What it’s about Alexander Elliot is a normal twelve-year-old boy but when he stumbles across a sword in a stone while fleeing a couple of bullies, he finds himself caught in an adventure where the fate of the Earth itself hangs in balance. The sword in the stone is, in fact, the Sword in the Stone – Excalibur – and the threat is no less than the evil half-sister of Arthur himself, Morgana. Excalibur may have deemed Alex worthy but can he, a now-young Merlin and a ragtag group of child-knights come together to battle this ancient threat or will infighting destroy them before they even get the chance? What we thought The legend of King Arthur and Camelot is the sort of tale that isn’t just timeless in the way it has resonated down the centuries but is pliable enough that it...

Pretty much everyone else has had their say on this so, despite not disagreeing at all with the general consensus, here's my own undoubtedly quite disorganized take on the X-Men movie none of us knew we wanted. After the all around terrible X-Men Origins: Wolverine and the thoroughly-lacking-in-its-own-convictions the Wolverine, Logan gives us a Wolverine movie that does the character justice - and then some. Drawing more from existential westerns like Shane (which actually appears on screen during the movie) and Unforgiven than from the typical superhero narratives we have mostly seen on screen, Logan is a tough, brutal and moody meditation on a life of violence, shot through with an unconventional family drama and healthy helpings of action, humour and sci-fi weirdness. The story itself is as simple as the title character needing to get a young mutant who is, for all intents and purposes, his daughter across country to the Canadian border where there is a hope of a new a...