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In his first appearance in 2017's Justice League , Jason Momoa’s Aquaman made his mark by being the bro-est superhero around. Now he has his own movie, and director James Wan actually dials down his bro-ness – which is pretty much the only thing dialled down here, because this is a film that’s going extremely hard in pretty much every direction. While not all of it works, its failures end up being part of its charm: whatever you think of its extremely loud and fairly dumb approach, it knows the only way to make it work is to commit 100%.  There’s a real balancing act going on here: even for a superhero, underwater fish lord Aquaman is hard to take seriously, and yet treating him as a joke would be fatal. So this sets out to make him the most normal thing in the film, plonking the hard-drinking part-time superdude into a meandering story that takes in a sad lighthouse dad, seven distinct (and usually bonkers) undersea kingdoms, a royal feud, the title “Ocean Maste...

First, some caveats: I have not yet seen Aquaman , Eighth Grade or The Favourite , some or all of which might possibly sneak into my top ten. I also haven’t seen Gotti , because it didn’t get a commercial cinema release in this country and if we’re going to let direct-to-DVD titles into this kind of list then the worst movies of the year are all going to be things sensible people have never heard of. So these are all titles I saw at a cinema in 2018, otherwise the film of the year would have been Brawl in Cell Block 99 and we could have given up on movies by the end of January.   Best films of 2018: As is often the way, I easily could have listed twice as many films here. While these are in no particular order, just outside the top ten were a whole lot of films, including Roma , Cold War , Upgrade , Won’t You be My Neighbour , Sweet Country , A Simple Favour , Teen Titans Go! to the Movies , First Reformed , The Breaker-Upperers , Juliet Naked and Tully . But this remains my to...

Author Lee Israel (Melissa McCarthy) is in trouble. Her last book was a flop, her agent is ducking her calls, she can't make any progress on her next book and she's hitting the bottle pretty hard. Worse, she's not exactly someone whose company people enjoy; when she's fired from a fact-checking gig (for drinking and swearing on the job) it's hard to see her securing steady employment around people any time soon. When she stumbles across a letter written by Fanny Brice (the subject of her next book) she promptly tries to sell it - only to discover the lack of spicy content means it'll only bring in a small sum. Adding a gag-tastic PS bumps up the price, and soon Israel is forging celebrity letters left right and center, going so far as to collect a range of authentically old typewriters to give her forgeries some much-needed authenticity. With this boost in her fortunes comes a boost in her personal life, as she makes a friend: Jack Hock (Richard E ...

The first Creed felt like a minor miracle, a Rocky movie that reinvented the franchise by tapping into its core greatness even as it brought the story forward into a very different world. Creed II tries something even more difficult: it sets out to redeem Rocky IV, the silliest, most over-the-top (and yet somehow not the worst) film in the series. The result has its flaws, but when it works it takes the franchise’s biggest dead weight and lifts it high over its head. On one level the story is little more than a series of fights and training montages as Creed (Michael B Jordan) initially wins the heavyweight title against a clapped-out champ, only to find a slick boxing promoter (Russell Hornsby) has a surprise for him: Russian punching machine Viktor Drago (Florian “Big Nasty” Munteanu), son of Rocky IV 's Soviet killbot Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren). Everyone wants to see Creed take on the son of the man who killed his father – everyone except Rocky (Sylvester Stallone) – but ...

There’s a certain kind of Disney film that, given a hundred million dollars, you could probably make yourself. You know the type: after a brief handful of scenes set in a twee version of the recent past (the more English the better) to establish various rote character conflicts almost always involving family (dead parents usually come in handy here), our plucky lead finds themselves transported into a magical fantasy world that doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense and can possibly be read simply as a metaphor for our lead’s personal issues.  Once in that fantasy world - which is almost always vaguely medieval and somewhat rural rather than steampunk urban or, say, Roman - she or he (but usually she) meets a collection of characters – some CGI, some big-name actors in outlandish costumes – while wandering through a variety of lavish yet somehow generic locations. Forests are good but castles are better, and once you throw in a couple of waterfalls or a mountain or two you're pre...

  Watching Romper Stomper , the six part series based on the original 1992 film (out now on DVD and blu-ray), it’s clear the producers - which include the movie’s writer / director Geoffrey Wright - were faced with a dilemma. The original film is notorious for its right-wing politics, but the film itself is more about ceaseless motion and senseless violence than arguing any coherent philosophy. It’s a string of high-energy scenes of action, destruction and dancing (it’s largely structured like a dance movie), loosely justified by some racist slogans and Nazi flags. But trying to sustain that level of energy and intensity across six hours would clearly be impossible; the film struggles to keep it up for 90 minutes. So instead of following up on the original’s focus on a bunch of manic clowns trashing Footscray largely because they can, this series is all about the politics, presenting a variety of people and groups united by their connection to an aggressive strand of righ...

There are a lot of interesting things going on in Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald . It's just that none of them manage to turn it into an interesting movie. It's been pointed out by more than one reviewer that this is a bridging movie in the Fantastic Beasts series, a film that is mostly setting things up for what is to come. That's clearly true; it's just that it fails to provide a reason why anyone would want more of this incoherent wand-waving. But we all know why we'll be back. The Harry Potter franchise has built up such massive reserves of goodwill that seemingly nothing - not social media turning on creator J.K. Rowling, not films that are nothing more than blatant cash-grabs, not continuing Harry Potter's story only as a massively expensive stage play - can dissuade the fans. The fact that about 80% of Harry Potter's appeal was that it was a fantasy version of an already romanticised version of high school and Crimes of Grindelwald is a...