Film Review: Movie 43 (2013)

Halle Berry (pictured) discovers that Catwoman is no longer the biggest mistake she's ever made.

There are many different kinds of bad film, with no single genre being immune from producing absolute crap, but far and away the worse kind of bad movie is a bad comedy. This is for the simple reason that if a drama or a horror film is bad, you can at least laugh at how badly it fails to function on even its most basic level. Mystery Science Theater 3000 spent a decade demonstrating that fact by turning bad horror, science fiction and drama into comedy. On the other hand, if a comedy doesn't make you laugh, then there's really no good way to respond to it. All you can do is sit there and pray that it ends soon.

Film Review: Scoop (2006)

Having decamped to London for Match Point and seemingly revitalised his creative juices, Woody Allen could easily have decided to mine the same somber thriller territory for all that it was worth. Ever driven by his distracted, digressive muse, he instead returned to doing exactly the same kind of strained comedy that he'd struggled with since 2000, the only noticeable difference being that the actors and accents had changed.

Film Review: The Wolverine (2013)

One of the interesting things about the X-Men films is that, even though the series now spans more than a decade and encompasses half a dozen films, the series has avoided becoming too bogged down in its own storytelling. Each film in the original trilogy might have built upon the one that went before, but they were largely self-contained stories. This was also the case with the execrable X-Men Origins: Wolverine and the half-decent X-Men: First Class, both of which played on the established characters without feeling like they were just pieces of a puzzle in the way that some of the Avengers-related films could. The sixth film in the series, The Wolverine, is the first to exhibit symptoms of being merely an element of a larger story, rather than a story actually worth telling in its own right.

Film Review: Les Miserables (2012)

Based on his previous films - 2009's The Damned United and 2010's The King's Speech - it's unlikely that many people thought of Tom Hooper as the natural choice to direct the film adaptation of Les Miserables. After all, his first two films consisted largely - in the case of The King's Speech, almost solely - of people talking in small, cramped rooms, and neither is comparable in scale to the task of bringing one of the most popular stage musicals in history to the screen. They also raise the spectre of every dramatist who has tried their hand at imitating the rhythms and style of musicals without actually understanding what can make them so spellbinding. (See Joel Schumacher's execrable adaptation of Phantom of the Opera for a textbook example of one such debacle.)