Because Everybody Else Has One

Another year, another big-screen Spider-man reboot. Things are a bit different this time, though. For all that people love complaining about the plethora of superhero films, this year has been a rather interesting showcase for why we should be glad they aren't going away soon. For a start, despite appearances to the contrary, superhero films are not the only "tentpole", big budget blockbuster being released, it's just that - for this year at least - they seem to be well on their way to being the only good ones (update: as of a screening I saw today, that's no longer the case!). While the Mummy brought us a stale take on a well-established property, Logan gave us the most genuinely mature take on a "Big 2" superhero to date. As King Arthur lived down to its director's worst tendencies, comics' most classic female superhero got a film of her own that not only more than did justice to the character but deservedly became the biggest movie of the...

Hugh Grant is back doing his Hugh Grant thing. Not that I'm complaining. This review is also up at Channel 24 What it's about With his career in the dumps, Keith Michaels, a once celebrated Hollywood screenwriter, heads off to be the lecturer of a screenwriting course at an East Coast college. What we thought There is nothing at all surprising or remarkable about the Rewrite and there's definitely something ironic about a movie with this unoriginal a script set around a screenwriting course. And yet, there is something oddly comforting about just how familiar it all is. At the heart of all this, of course, is Hugh Grant who is on full-on bumbling, foppish cad mode and though this is nothing we haven't seen a thousand times before, to me at least, he's as endearing and as funny as ever. If you don't like Hugh Grant, you need to stay as far away from this as possible but if you liked him in Four Wedding and a Funeral and any one of the ...

The title does kind of sum up the film's biggest problems, but I'll be lying if I said I didn't very much enjoy it. This review is also up at Channel 24 What it's about An out-of-work engineer takes up a substitute teacher job at a severely under-funded, mismanaged public school of mostly Hispanic, sometimes illegal, immigrants but when a diverse group of four students approach him to help them enter a highly competitive robotics competition, he soon finds himself becoming embroiled in his young students' lives far more than he ever expected. Based, somewhat loosely, on a true story. What we thought While there is admittedly what to be sniffy about in this quite obvious and clichéd (yet still mostly true) feel-good drama, I nonetheless found Spare Parts to be one of the most charming and pleasantly surprising minor gems to come out so far this year. Faint praise, perhaps, but that seems oddly fitting for a film that is this unassumingly lovely....