The Hall of Fire

Zone of Interest

Fascinating and original take on horrendous events, would recommend.

I've been re-watching the extended 1984 Dune (I won't call it the David Lynch version as he disowned it) and while the 2021/24 films are far superior there's actually a handful of things I think the 1984 version does better. Despite having less time to work with it does more with some secondary char...

Dune 2 has passed $380 million, so it's now broken even on its modest $190 million budget. Which is great news for cinemas, Legendary, Warner Bros, and the industry generally, which had suffered series of bombs through 2023 ( Barbie and Oppenheimer being high-profile exceptions). Interestingly, it'...

To give the high-level review without explicit spoilers, the film really succeeds on the foundations. The script is solid. It has some excellent acting. We knew Timothee Chalamet was able to play Paul, but he was also able to summon the gravitas to play the war leader Muad’dib, and his transformatio...

Saw Part 2 this evening. Unsurprisingly, a heavy meal of a film that will take some time to digest. It definitely hits the combination of visual spectacle we’d expect from Denis Villeneuve following Part 1 with an unsettling otherworldliness appropriate for the source material. As an adaptation it h...

Very strong reviews for Part 2 - 96% on Rottentomatoes.

Just re-watched Oppenheimer . The first time, from memory, I've watched a film twice in theatres since Return of the King in 2003. I had read most of the source book, American Prometheus , in the meantime. It really came together for me on the second viewing, and I was impressed with just how true t...

The Last Voyage of the Demeter is at 39% on RT , with reviews complaining about bloody violence overlaid with ominous music and not too much else. Which is what I was afraid of, and is a trend with Dracula being poorly-served by film. Hollywood doesn't seem to think audiences will buy Stoker's far m...

The Demeter subplot is among the most effectively written horror I've read. It has even more impact because the reader knows things that the characters don't, and because in this case being genre savvy wouldn't do the character any good. And then to have it end in a weather report, with the narrato...

Meanwhile, saw Kenneth Branagh's Murder on the Orient Express. The cast is wonderful, but Branagh is not at all a good Poirot. Weird, because he clearly can do characters who are not hypermanly, he was a perfect Gilderoy Lockhart. Worse, the script doesn't trust the book and tries to add excitement...

Barbie . Was definitely on the fence about seeing it in theatres, given that I’m picky about what I go to the cinema for. And I’m not in the target market (as least I thought I wasn’t, now I’m not sure). But I was intrigued by the trailers and the debate it generated online, and felt I needed to en...

Oppenheimer. Very hard to know where to start writing about this movie. Given that it’s basically three hours of people talking about physics and politics broken up with (spoiler alert) one very big explosion it’s surprisingly compelling. Which is, I suppose, a testament to Nolan’s skill as a direc...

I just finished watching Tenet on TV. The advantages of watching it on the small screen are 1. Not getting overwhelmed by the excessive blasting of anything and everything that moves (more violent than James Bond movies, and more gritty), 2. The ability to stop and rewind to catch important little ...

Stumbled on this interesting video essay, which breaks down Barbenheimer in far more detail than I expected was possible. I have to say it might work for me - I'm strongly considering seeing Barbie in the cinema, which I'd be unlikely to do otherwise. And I was intrigued by the 2001: A Space Odyssey...

Sorry, I still don't get it. But I often don't. There wasn't (as far I know) any intentional plan to release and market the movies together. It just happened that their respective studios picked the same release date and the Internet found the juxtaposition funny. In all seriousness, though, this w...

Barbie is off to a strong start with 90% on RT from early reviews. Still waiting for the reviews for Oppenheimer - I've got my ticket for Sunday.

The big day is almost here. Choose your fighter.

The "great moderniser sweeping away feudalism and spreading the Enlightenment across Europe" I am far from a Napoleonic scholar so it's not a surprise that I've never encountered that take before, but it seems a bit sus. Especially since he specifically declined to make a promise to "...

The "great moderniser sweeping away feudalism and spreading the Enlightenment across Europe" versus "vain tyrant waging incessant wars to aggrandise himself and put members of his family on foreign thrones" debate on Napoleon goes back to his contemporaries, so I expect we'll see...

This popped up out of nowhere given the fame of the director and lead, but looks extremely impressive: