Half-Time Top Ten

July marks the half-way point of the year and, as has become customary, both for myself and pretty much the whole of the Internet, that means that it is time to take stock and try to figure out what kind of year it has been so far. And obviously the best way to judge something as ephemeral as quality is arbitrarily ranking vastly different films. Yay, film criticism!

Film Review: Monsters University (2013)

The biggest obstacle facing any prequel is that of keeping an audience engaged even when they know the broad strokes of how the story will finish. It's not a problem unique to prequels - most people were probably aware that Lincoln wasn't going to end with an Animal House-style freeze frame explaining how awesome Abe's second term and subsequent retirement were - but it's still hard to make what is essentially back story compelling when the blueprint has already been laid out so thoroughly before. At their worst, this can result in films that consist of little more than colouring in parts of a picture which is already pretty complete, and in the process runs the risk of marring it with talk of midichlorians or amnesia bullets.