Chicken Run: Dawn Of The Nugget (2023) - Movie Review

The idea of making a sequel to Aardman’s first feature has been floating around since that film initially came out, and considering modern trends towards legacy sequels and the like, it would make sense for them to attempt it around now. It helps that their last film, the Shaun The Sheep sequel, was bloomin’ fantastic and a high benchmark for a studio that’s already a legend in the industry. However, for both good and bad, this is quite a different clucker from the original.

Swimming With Men (2019) - Movie Review

Growing up is difficult. Growing old, even more so. The mindset that aging can put people in can make for great works of cinema, but unfortunately, this film isn’t one of them. Based on the 2010 documentary Men Who Swim (making this the third film I’ve covered this year that’s based on a pre-existing piece of cinema, after Fighting With My Family and Hotel Mumbai), this film has its material cut out for it with a story about a group of older men who form a synchronised swimming team and compete on the international level in Milan. However, both as a dramatisation of actual events and as a piece of drama on its own, this fails to do much more than swim in circles.

Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie (2016) - Movie Review

The current trend in British cinema that seems to crop up every year is adapting popular British TV comedies to the big screen. From Mrs. Brown’s Boys to The Inbetweeners, even just to characters from those shows like Keith Lemon, this seems to be the big predictable avenue for the cinematic output of the UK. It is also, to no surprise of anyone who has seen the majority of these films, a trend that yields little if any genuinely entertaining work. Okay, the first Inbetweeners movie was decent, but otherwise it’s a pretty basic guarantee for dirt-under-the-bottom-of-the-barrel crap in cinemas, or DVD if you’re even that fortunate.

So, with that in mind, it’s really worrying that the second film I’ll be covering today is an adaptation of a series that is very close to my childhood. I grew up watching Absolutely Fabulous on DVD with my mother and, if given the opportunity, I would lead a pub sing-a-long of This Wheel’s On Fire at the drop of a hat. Is this going to be another piece of dreck, or will I be so lucky as to find the one recent British TV adaptation that doesn’t suck?