The Movie Waffler The Movie Waffler

Retro Review - Hell Night (1981)


Directed by: Tom DeSimone
Starring: Linda Blair, Vincent Van Patten, Peter Barton, Kevin Brophy, Suki Goodwin

Nowadays nobody who wants a legitimate career in the film industry would dream about starting in porn but that wasn't always the case.

New Release Review - Coriolanus


Directed by: Ralph Fiennes
Starring: Ralph Fiennes, Gerard Butler, Vanessa Redgrave, Brian Cox, Jessica Chastain

The concept of staying faithful to a Shakespearean text is antithetic to film-making yet most film-makers insist on such reverence when tackling the bard.

New Release Review - The Descendants


Directed by: Alexander Payne
Starring: George Clooney, Shailene Woodley, Amara Miller, Robert Forster

Clooney is the only bright spark in this otherwise dull, charmless Golden Globe winner.

New Release Review - J. Edgar


Directed by: Clint Eastwood
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Judi Dench, Naomi Watts, Armie Hammer

This film faces the same hurdles as "The Iron Lady", how do you humanise such a controversial and largely reviled figure?

New Release Review - Haywire


Directed by: Steven Soderbergh
Starring: Gina Carano, Michael Angarano, Ewan McGregor, Michael Douglas, Michael Fassbender, Channing Tatum, Antonio Banderas, Bill Paxton

Some movies are so insultingly bad that you actually leave the cinema with a headache from trying to figure out how something so awful could ever have been greenlit.

New Release Review - Shame


Directed by: Steve McQueen
Starring: Michael Fassbender, Carey Mulligan, James Badge Dale

There have been some excellent films made on the subject of addiction, films like Nicholas Ray's "Bigger Than Life" and Karel Reisz' "The Gambler". There have also been some awfully judgemental right-wing propaganda pieces like "Reefer Madness" and "Assassin Of Youth". "Shame" falls in to the latter camp, it's the "Reefer Madness" of sex-addiction movies.

New Release Review - War Horse


Directed by: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Jeremy Irvine, Peter Mullan, Emily Watson

They say you can't polish a turd but in bringing Lee Hall and Richard Curtis' awful screenplay to the screen Spielberg has applied liberal amounts of Mr Sheen to a steaming pile of horseshit.

New Release Review - The Iron Lady


Directed by: Phyllida Lloyd
Starring: Meryl Streep, Jim Broadbent, Olivia Colman, Alexandra Roach

The biopic is a tricky genre. If the character doesn't interest you to begin with chances are you won't enjoy the movie.

New Release Review - The Artist

Directed by: Michel Hazanavicius
Starring: Jean Dujardin, Berenice Bejo, John Goodman, James Cromwell

Despite being black and white, silent and French, "The Artist" could be one of the most accessible movies to come from outside the Hollywood system in quite a while.

New Release Review - The Innkeepers

Directed by: Ti West
Starring: Sara Paxton, Pat Healy, Kelly McGillis

Ti West is regarded by many as the best American horror director of this generation and with such poor competition it's hard to argue this claim.

New Release Review - Creature


Directed by: Fred Andrews
Starring: Mehcad Brooks, Serinda Swan, Daniel Bernhardt, Sid Haig, Amanda Fuller

If movies have taught me one thing it's that you don't wanna go travelling through rural Louisiana.

Pre-Code Retrospective - Island Of Lost Souls (1932)

Directed by: Erle C. Kenton
Starring: Charles Laughton, Richard Arlen, Bela Lugosi

Kenton's adaptation of HG Wells' "Island of Doctor Moreau" has been an unfairly forgotten work of pre-code horror.

New Release Review - Anonymous

Directed by: Roland Emmerich
Starring: Rhys Ifans, Vanessa Redgrave, Joely Richardson, David Thewlis

I've suffered through Emmerich's body of work like schoolboys suffer through Shakespeare. Fitting then that the two should be united, and just as you'd expect it's a hell of a hard slog.

New Release Review - Contagion

Directed by: Steven Soderbergh
Starring: Gwyneth Paltrow, Matt Damon, Jude Law, Kate Winslet, Jennifer Ehle, Elliot Gould, Laurence Fishbourne, Marion Cotillaird

Some stories are just too ambitious for a two-hour film, "Contagion" is one.

New Release Review - We Need To Talk About Kevin

Directed by: Lynne Ramsey
Starring: Tilda Swinton, Ezra Miller, John C Reilly, Jasper Newell

New Release Review - The Ides Of March

Directed by: George Clooney
Starring: Ryan Gosling, George Clooney, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Paul Giamatti, Evan Rachel Wood, Marisa Tomei

New Release Review - In Time

Directed by: Andrew Niccol
Starring: Justin Timberlake, Amanda Seyfried, Cillian Murphy, Olivia Wilde

"Time is money" goes the saying, but the opposite is also very true.