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BlogalongaStarWars: Episode 6: Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge Of The Sith

WAR! HEURGH! What is it good for? Opening a Star Wars title crawl, that's what. As further atonement for Episode I's sins, George Lucas launches Episode III with a rocket-fuelled declaration of intent that promises the polar opposite of trade route taxation and guardians of peace, and it's the beginning of a bravura 24-minute sequence that finally signals the return of the franchise after over

Bridge Of Spies

"A battle is being fought by two competing views of the world," intones a character in Steven Spielberg's Cold War drama Bridge Of Spies, and the subtext hangs in the air like a dense cloud of obviousness. It'd be easy to accuse the line of being trite - yes, that battle is always being fought, we get it - if it wasn't hammered home by two recent real-world events: the terrorist attacks in

BlogalongaStarWars: Episode 5: Star Wars: Episode II: Attack Of The Clones

My first viewing of Attack Of The Clones was in Orlando, and the reaction of the American audience - especially to the moment when Yoda pulls his lightsabre out of his trousers and waves it around - was so absurdly excitable that it's left me with a falsely fond memory of the film. Whenever I pop it on nowadays I remember how much fun all that Stateside whooping and hollering was, and lull

Spectre

James Bond is back, in case you hadn't noticed, and this time his mission is even more impossible than ever: to top Skyfall. Off the back of the most successful, cannily post-modern and downright surprising Bond film ever, Sam Mendes and his crack team of operatives needed to pull something unbelievably amazing out of the Bondbag with Spectre. So does it top Skyfall? Well, no, not quite. Does

Book Corner: Back To The Future - The Ultimate Visual History

As we are all no doubt painfully aware, Back To The Future is the joint-best film ever made of all time ever, and so when the sexual tyrannosaurs at Titan Books offered me a copy of their new book Back To The Future: The Ultimate Visual History to review, I bit their hand off at the shoulder. Having once, long ago, owned and read to within an inch of its papery life Michael Klastorin and Sally

Sicario

I've got my eye on Denis Villeneuve. Prisoners may have been overcooked nonsense but it was, at least, enjoyable and stunningly-shot overcooked nonsense, and Enemy is a lip-smackingly atmospheric oddity that proved Villeneuve's versatility (at least to me: I haven't seen his Oscar-nommed Incendies, or indeed anything else he made before that, which means you have every right to ignore my stupid

LFF2015: Green Room

Jeremy Saulnier's follow-up to the intriguing Blue Ruin continues his series of Films With Misleadingly Soothing Colours In The Title in typically unsoothing style. Taking that film's blackly comic revenge-led theme to its next logical step, Green Room borders on horror with its wince-inducing violence and genuinely unpredictable death toll. Patrick Stewart becomes Saulnier's first big name,