Radioactive (2020) - Movie Review

Time for round three of our look at Jack Thorne’s scripted work over 2020, and judging by how the last two turned out, I admit that I wasn’t expecting much from this. Also, as a bit of a change of pace from my other looks at films adapted from comics this year, I haven’t read Lauren Redniss’ source material (mainly because the only access I have to it presently is the audiobook, which for a comparison between visual mediums is pretty useless), so I’m once again going to let Thorne’s writing stand or fall on its own. And while I concede that this is yet another instance of the visuals overselling the text, I’d also argue that this is way, way easier to recommend than Secret Garden or Dirt Music.

Beirut (2018) - Movie Review

The plot: Former U.S. diplomat Mason (Jon Hamm) has succumbed to alcoholism after the death of his wife ten years earlier. He is contacted by his old colleagues to mediate a negotiation in Mason's former station Beirut, where a terrorist organisation has taken Mason's old friend Cal (Mark Pellegrino) hostage. As he re-enters the political hot spot and tries to navigate the numerous factions vying for power, he could get a chance to not only save his friend but also find the person who took his family from him.

A United Kingdom (2016) - Movie Review

Even though humanity loves quoting “can’t judge a book by its cover”, we sure do that very thing quite a bit. Then again, we often present ourselves with opportunities to do so and none are more apparent in that intent than movie trailers. Now, over the course of this year, we’ve seen a wide spectrum of trailers from the good (10 Cloverfield Lane) to the bad (Trolls) to the outright annoying (The Angry Birds Movie), and some of them have even given a far weaker impression of the official product than is actually necessary. Today’s film, on the other hand? You can almost smell the cheese coming off of this thing, and considering this is meant to be a drama, that can’t be a good thing. Every time it got to the line “I love my people, I love this land… but I love my wife”, not matter how many times I’d heard it up to that point, I had to put a lot of effort into not just laughing my arse off in the cinema. It’s one of those “Nothing is more powerful than the human spirit” kind of lines that is near-impossible to take seriously. So, with that bit of unintentional comedy in mind, how is the film proper?