Wild Mountain Thyme (2021) - Movie Review

Much like with The Woman In The Window, the latest from writer/director John Patrick Shanley feels like a film that wants to immediately let the audience know how much of a shambles they’re in for right from the start. Here, that takes the form of opening narration from Christopher Walken as an Irish farmer talking about how he’s already dead, but will stick around because he died in the middle of telling a story. This is the first piece of dialogue we get at about two minutes into this hour-and-a-half feature, and it’s an apt introduction for a film where I am struggling to figure out how anyone even reached this point, let alone thought it was a good idea.

Eddie The Eagle (2016) - Movie Review

Even though buddy cop action films may hold the crown for the most widely recognised clichés, they still don’t hold much of a candle to the oddity that is the inspirational sports movie. The wide-eyed innocent of the genre family, it walks this weird divide where it is often based on actual events and yet is easily one of the most fantastical forms of drama (or dramedy, as a lot of these turn out) out there. Don’t get me wrong, films like the Rocky series show that gritty realism is just as welcome in this sector of filmmaking… when they aren’t inserting helper robots and Russian super soldiers into the narrative, that is. We’ve even looked at a few of these before like Paper Planes and last year’s update of the Rocky canon with Creed; between them, we have a pretty decent spectrum of what could be expected from a film like this. Needless to say, this is very much in the former category this time, but maybe that need not be such a bad thing. This is Eddie The Eagle.

The Jungle Book (2016) - Movie Review

In the canon of important modern directors, I’m honestly surprised that Jon Favreau doesn’t get brought up more often in conversation. Sure, his work is sometimes hit-and-miss with critics (sometimes for no good reason like with Cowboys & Aliens) but when you put him into context with the current state of superhero films, he played a crucial role in getting where we are right now. 2008’s Iron Man was a serious make-or-break situation for the Marvel Cinematic Universe; if they screwed up, we wouldn’t have gotten the proceeding 8 years of astoundingly consistent output from Marvel Studios.

Hindsight does funny things to people, and sure, Robert Downey Jr. set a precedent for pitch-perfect casting in Marvel films, but if it wasn’t for Favreau’s engagingly populist style, we’d be looking at a far different landscape right now. After the lukewarm response to Iron Man 2, which admittedly wasn’t amazing but still decent, he went on to Cowboys & Aliens… and then he made Chef, which was basically his own admission of how difficult it is to break out of the big leagues and just make his own products. Well, he seems to be working with Disney once again with today’s film, a re-telling of one of Disney’s perennial classics.