Author: James Ruzicka

It’s no secret we have a soft spot for Tom Cruise at the Two Reel Cinema Club. But somehow I’d never seen American Made (2017), Doug Liman’s drug-running-small-plane picture, until this week. Imagine you really loved the final 45 minutes of Goodfellas, loved it so much you wanted to turn it into a whole feature […]

For my money William Gibson is the greatest living science fiction author, and I’m sure eventually someone, somewhere will finally feel brave enough to attempt to put Neuromancer on screen. In the meantime, we have The Peripheral, the Amazon produced television adaptation of Gibson’s 2014 novel of the same name. I found the novel a […]

My children were too young to see Coraline when it first came out, and it has somehow passed us by since then – until this week. Thank goodness we’ve caught up with it at last: it’s a masterpiece. Coraline is the mardy only child of inattentive parents, who discovers a magical hidden door in their […]

I rewatched 2013’s Oblivion this week with the family. There’s a great deal to enjoy here: the production design is immaculate, the sound design may be even better, and Tom Cruise is as watchable as ever in his usual highly-competent-but-still-slightly-vulnerable-protagonist role. But the film suffers from one of my least favourite tropes: what I might […]

Timecop. It’s fantastic, incredible, bordering on genius. Such a magnificent achievement. Not the film. The film is a fun, quite silly mid-90s action romp with Jean Claude van Damme. It has all sorts of strange plot lurches, barely sketched in characters and a story world that looks like it might be making up the rules […]

The Adam Project, Netflix boasts, has been consistently in the service’s Top Ten since its release. You can understand why. People like to watch Ryan Reynolds. Even I quite like to watch Ryan Reynolds. He’s discovered that secret of success that Arnold Schwarzenegger, Humphrey Bogart and Julia Roberts all found out before him: be the […]

I’d never seen Jim Carrey vehicle Bruce Almighty until this week, when it made it onto the list of ‘films to watch with the family’. Oof. Was there ever a film as cynically written as this? Not in terms of its plot, which is a rather unambitious and unimaginative modern take on the H G Wells […]

The other children’s movie rewatch I got in recently was Luca, Pixar’s 2021 picture. Luca is a sea monster who assumes human form when on dry land. Warned by his family to stay away from the human village, he nevertheless becomes friends with Alberto, a fellow sea monster who lives on the land full time, […]

I had an opportunity to rewatch Pixar’s Turning Red this week with my son in an actual cinema, and I’m happy to say it’s still utterly fantastic – even better on the big screen, where the film’s smorgasbord of detail shines. The theme of the film is integration. 13 year old Meilin finds that the […]

My daughter has correctly identified Moana as possibly Disney’s greatest film. (Possibly anyone’s greatest film, in fact. Come on, fight me.) So we were looking forward to seeing The Sea Beast, Chris William’s new Netflix backed animated picture. Sadly, it doesn’t seem to be in the same territory. Well, it’s in exactly the same territory, of […]