Because Everybody Else Has One

You've got to love how Mama Mia had the title of its own sequel right there in its originating song's lyrics for decades! We already knew that Benny, Bjorn and (sometimes) Stig were masters of the pop hook but who knew they were clairvoyant too! And, yes, this is exactly the sort of film that deserves to be reviewed with as many exclamation marks as possible! Though, to spare everyone's sanity, I'll do my best to refrain from doing just that... Mama Mia: Here We Go Again is slightly better than its predecessor - which, much to my horror, apparently came out a decade ago! - but this being a Mama Mia film that also means it's slightly worse. As this hilarious, classic review from Mark Kermode proves, Mama Mia was always about totally shattering any preconceived notions of good taste and quality; where bad became good and dumb became brilliant. From Pierce Brosnan's laugh-out-loud bad but highly spirited singing of S.O.S to Meryl Streep over-dramatizing even t...

Killer title, not so killer movie. This review is also up at Channel 24 What it's about A chauvinistic, womanizing Cambridge poetry professor heads for a new life in Los Angeles with his beautiful and very pregnant, young student, but it's not long before his new commitment to being a faithful husband and father is challenged in the most unlikely ways. What we thought Any film that has as many alternate titles as How to Make Love Like an Englishman (we get its original title, but it's also known in other territories as Some Kind of Beautiful and Lessons in Love – which sound for all the world like 1980s John Hughes teen comedies) is bound to be the sort of crass, crappy product that even those soulless studios are pretty embarrassed about. And, mostly, they kind of have the right to be. It's a plodding, misjudged and nowhere near funny enough romantic comedy with a cast that probably should know better and an ass-backwards kind of morality that yo...

Brosnan's Never Say Never Again - but with more nudity, violence and bad language... This review is also up at Channel 24 . What it's about A retired CIA agent is brought back into the fold on a personal mission that soon finds him going head to head against his former apprentice. What we thought Take one former James Bond (Pierce Brosnan), one Bond Girl (Olga Kurylenko) and chuck them into a plot of super-spies, double crosses and international espionage and you get a film that is much comfort food as it is cliché. There is absolutely nothing even remotely original about The November Man and even less that's genuinely extraordinary about it but, in this case, that might not be such a bad thing. Brosnan plays a spy who is even more of a bastard than Bond but he plays him with much the same suave charm and acerbic wit that he brought to his most famous role and, even if the world he inhabits is less abjectly ridiculous than the one of that era o...