While Dirty Harry was a magnificent example of fantastical Hollywood filmmaking, a story that while gloriously entertaining didn’t try and reflect the real world, Zodiac is a more grounded attempt at telling the story of a serial killer loose in San Francisco. Yes Fincher’s direction is as flamboyant as ever and yes it’s a glossy big budget movie, but with its emphasis on...

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Unlike the media it lampoons, I don't despise Natural Born Killers because it's violent; I despise it because it's shit. Honestly, are there any other films that are quite so heavy-handed, poorly executed and mind numbingly dull as Stone's turgid 'satire'? I can't think of many – it certainly must rank amongst the worst films of the 90s.Of all the things I hate...

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Feel sorry for Inspector Harry Callahan. Not only does he have to abide by pesky laws and procedures, and not only is the Mayor a damned coward, but his new partner studied sociology. In other words, he's the sort of man who actually tries to understand criminal behaviour and fix society's problems with rational thought and all that jazz. But for Harry, what's...

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It’s not surprising that lots of people compare Bringing Out the Dead to Taxi Driver. Both are Martin Scorsese/Paul Schrader collaborations, both deal with the seedy underbelly of night-time New York and both deal with strung out individuals driving, er, vehicles. But comparisons are unfair. One, because any film is going to have a hard time living up to Taxi Driver, and two,...

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There are many ways that you can be trapped. You could be trapped in a job you hate. You could be trapped in an unloving relationship. Or you could be literally trapped – you could be held hostage or you could be imprisoned. But perhaps more terrifying than all of these is to be trapped in your own body. To have your mental...

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Ben is a rat. A smart rat, but a rat nonetheless. Socrates is also a rat; he’s as smart as Ben but more loveable. Willard, though, is a pathetic loser. A friendless nobody who’s under the thumb of his skeletal mother. What’s clear from the beginning of Willard is that the two rats who vie for the affection of their master are the...

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According to the wisdom of John Rambo, when you’re pushed, killing is as easy as breathing. Now one may doubt that statement, as breathing is pretty fucking easy (unless you have polio or something), but in a glorious orgy of violence, Rambo proves his statement to be true. Killing is a piece of piss.The volume of slayings in Rambo is well documented but...

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I never thought a film would come along that would be so bad it would make Alien: Resurrection look like a masterpiece. But Paul W.S. Anderson has succeeded in performing that dark miracle, for Alien Vs. Predator (or AVP for short) is a complete stinker. You know the film is in trouble about two minutes in. There's a scene where Alexa, the main...

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I don't care what most people say, Alien 3 is a damn good film. It's dark, it's gritty and it's refreshingly downbeat. It was a damn good end to the Alien trilogy. Unfortunately though, because of the negative reaction to the film and the desire to make some more cash out of a potentially lucrative franchise, Alien: Resurrection got made. And boy is...

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Alien 3, by and large, is considered a poor film. Most people see it as a lazy re-hash of the first instalment and most people hate the way that it dispensed with the other surviving characters of Aliens. Well, I can kind of see their point. Alien 3 does opt for the dark, claustrophobic atmosphere of the first and it does have the...

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Thank the cinematic gods for pluralisation. ‘Oh, what’s that? Alien only had one critter? Well, let’s slap an ‘s’ on the end of the title and have hundreds of the motherfuckers. It’ll be great.’ And indeed it is. Diehard fans of Alien may bemoan the different approach that Cameron takes – lots of guns and the Aliens themselves reduced to bugs to be...

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