Mark Hale

Why Guy Ritchie still gets money to make poorly scripted guff like this is beyond me. It looks like the cast is having fun but anyone watching might struggle. Imagine "Snatch" meets "Inglorious Bastards" without the wit, style and dash of either script, directed by someone more used to making safety videos about warehouse racking. Aside from the crew of wisecracking agents, the supporting cast are nothing but wooden spoons with faces drawn on them. In particular, Rory Kinnear's Churchill is a career low. He must have wanted the money for a new conservatory.

Had my doubts after the first episode and the disappointment has grown as the story builds. Nothing but stock characters wading through a swamp of "modern" espionage thriller tropes. A secret agent whose family doesn't know what she does. A jet-setting hitman whose family doesn't know what he does. An Ex-IRA informer with a connection to a secretive gunsmith, who's also a highly skilled killing machine. Corporate villains who want to have an enfant terrible Tech Bro. You'll have seen it all before in much better movies and TV series than "Jackal." Then there are the disguises. If you want to see Eddy Redmayne in a variety of wigs and cheap-looking prosthetics, you're in for a wild ride. Otherwise you're better off saving time and watching Edward Fox as Jackal's original incarnation in the 1973 movie.

Nice to see some familiar old faces from 70s and 80s UK TV (plus a sprinkle of Hollywood supporting artists) in this pile of old tosh, but do not expect a decent crime thriller here. The cast are a mixture of seasoned pros having a laugh, utter muppets (the producer's wife gets a part despite her lack of talent,) plus some weirdos madly intent on taking things far too seriously. They labour with a script full of syntax errors that the director must have tried to have them deliver verbatim. It's also laden with stock characters, clichés and all the usual crime thriller tropes. It's so amazingly, comically, laughably bad that you may just end up watching the whole thing and laughing up a lung! The production is distinctly cheap, with lots of digital gunfire, bullet strikes, explosions, obvious sets and incongruous stock footage. My personal comedy highlight was the electric scooters used by the criminal gang that had a Harley-Davidson engine rumble added in post production! It gets 2 stars for the giggles, not because it's any good. If they make a sequel (the set-up for that is in the closing titles) then I won't be bothering.

Pointless, predictable "Family with Problems facing Extinction Event" movie. Gerard Butler and Morena Baccarin did their best to make me care about their predicament, but after 20 minutes of by-the-numbers heart string tugging and a low-res CGI city obliteration I looked for something else to watch.

Sub-par 80s Cold War comic strip action movie. Charlize Theron's central character takes a massive amount of punishment in the fight sequences and still manages to look fabulous the next morning. A lot of acting talent wasted on a throwaway plot.

Ugh. I'm not massively familiar with the whole of Edgar Allan Poe's ouvre, but then again, neither were the people who created the Netflix binfire "The Fall of The House of Usher." They've shown no respect for the source material and have managed to edit out all of the Gothic atmosphere, suspense and terror that Poe was famous for. "Usher" is Poe-lite, made to appeal to Gen-Z but with zero respect for either the original author or the target audience. Many plot points were telegraphed way in advance, reducing some episodes to a long wait for the climax that I'd been expecting for 40 minutes. The episode "The Masque of The Red Death" was a prime example. "Usher's" Prospero is a dead man walking as soon as he's announced. He's unredeemably awful and if you're familiar with Poe's "The Masque of The Red Death," you'll work out how Prospero will meet his end well in advance. Roderick Usher's unfolding confession will give a lot of each episode's grisly despatches away anyway. All of the suspense gets washed away, like so much blood down a mortuary drain. All of the Usher family are grotesque, overwrought caricatures with barely any humanity. I think that we are supposed to want them to die horribly because they're all so nasty. They all meet their ends in various ways that are contrived to mirror some of Poe's most well-known works. His poetry is jammed into the dialogue from time to time, and fits about as well as a silver fork in an electrical outlet. The effect is just as jarring, anyway. The cast appear to have fun with their characters and the outlandish scenarios, but there's not much fun on offer to the viewer. It's just misery porn with some crude horror movie shocks that get repeated so often that you quickly become immune. Bored, even. There's no real structure to the world building in "Usher." The Poe references are either blindingly obvious or pointlessly obscure. It's a waste of acting talent and production time to reduce this classic author's work down to something the writers must have thought would appeal to regular TikTok viewers. Avoid.

My introduction (far too late) to the Zimverse. An inventive, enjoyable, silly little comedy that references many sci-fi classics and pokes fun at many of the genre tropes.

It's a not great, not terrible reboot of a franchise that became increasingly grandiose and implausible in the space of 3 movies. "Resurrections" manages to reference relevant sections of the original trilogy and build a reasonably believable world for its heroes and villains to inhabit. It's worth watching if you're a fan of the original movie and its sub-par sequels. 3.6 out of 5.

A solid drama that uses the 2008 financial crisis as a backdrop. The ensemble cast chews the scenery as a catastrophe unfolds overnight. This is the counterpoint to the story of "The Big Short," when the brown stuff hit the fan at a big financial institution that was, nudge nudge, "too big to fail."