Mom 
Goldeneye arrived on Home Video this week in 1996, after a November 16th, 1995 theatrical release.Right as James Bond was dying. Not in a dramatic shaken-not-stirred type cliffhanger, but more of a slow, embarrassing, nobody’s-returning-calls kind of way. Moore had turned him into a cartoon but the overcorrection for Dalton had left 007 as someone … Read more
Being a good person is worthless. That’s all – no notes, caveats or exceptions. Everything we need to know is in those 6 words. Unfortunately, it’s not a lesson you can just be told – luckily The Dark Crystal (1982) drops some hints on how we can learn it. Right from the very beginning it’s … Read more
My Girl isn’t the film I was expecting to see. For context: it came out the year after Home Alone. Macaulay Culkin was the biggest child star on the planet, an adorable little scamp with the comic Munch scream who proved a well-prepared eight-year-old could take out two grown men with paint and a blowtorch. … Read more
Felonious Monks and Furious Egos: one of the best films you’ve probably forgotten. The Name of the Rose (1986) took over four years to make and faltered several times before it finally ascended to cinema screens. Casting a washed-up action star was a long shot that nearly crucified the film’s finances but the decision turned … Read more
“You have to tell the truth.” It’s one of the first lies we’re told as kids – but we dutifully pass it down to our children anyway, convincing ourselves we believe it. Donnie Darko is a cautionary tale about what happens when you believe that lie. His world runs on denial: the guru is a … Read more
You remember Cocoon being heartwarming, right? Right? Yeah – of course it was. Yeah. Soo – as someone who’s just rewatched it, my advice is that you hold onto that idea for dear life and don’t go trying to recapture that feeling by watching it again. Let it stay comfortably and reassuringly in your brain … Read more
You know that feeling when you watch a horror movie and the character ignores the warning signs? It’s probably my biggest frustration with the horror genre. Why would you create a plot that relies on one (or all) of the main characters doing something really stupid? Like, I don’t know, reading strange words aloud from … Read more
The release of The Addams Family in 1991 was a pivotal moment for teenage me – it changed how I viewed the world. Before this, I’d learned what families should look like from an early age – tidy, respectable and normal. The kind you see in sitcoms where everyone learns a valuable lesson by the … Read more
Mr Dark isn’t the villain in Something Wicked This Way Comes – he’s just the enabler. The scariest part is watching your entire town queue up for obviously impossible promises while you scream the truth and nobody listens. Ray Bradbury wrote a screenplay that was a strange choice for one of the largest media conglomerates … Read more
We love movies – ALL movies. Every single one has something to say. Each one tells a story but sometimes we can forget that stories are never *just* stories… Before we learned to banish the darkness with fire, we were telling stories to shape and explain our world. We daubed mud on cave walls to … Read more