Ten minutes of watching this and I was fixing to put my smart-arse put-down critic head on, lining Paul Blart up for a sound critical kicking. Bland, unimaginative, generic, clichéd and lame – it wasn’t looking good, to be honest.

After...

If it was possible to be down on a massive multi-million pound venture that hundreds of people spent months pouring their heart and soul into on the basis of a mere eight-word sentence, then I was only too glad to give it a go.

"What happens...

It’s weird. To me as a comic geek, the release of the Watchmen film felt more of cultural landmark than just two and a half hours of entertainment. Supposedly unfilmable, it had knocked around various film studios for over 20 years, its legendary status...

A low-budget horror, saddled with a 15 certificate, a little-known cast and an unknown first-time director - doesn’t sound too promising, does it? Mercifully, the sum total is greater than its parts, as Hush proves to be a smart, taut, tense and neatly...

With one of the key men behind Borat and Curb Your Enthusiasm calling the shots, it should come as no surprise that Religulous is edgy and thought-provoking satire.

Stand-up comic Bill Maher has a bee in his bonnet about organised religion...

Is there any kind of entry procedure for Mount Rushmore, or is it a closed shop and you have to be a long-dead president or summat? I’m just wondering, 'cos it’s clear there’s an argument that Clint Eastwood should be up there, something that Gran Torino...

While the rockumentary isn’t exactly a genre that’s in need of expanding, few of us will ever moan when its ranks swell. Following in the path of such behemoths as This Is Spinal Tap and Metallica: Some Kind Of Monster, Anvil! The Story of Anvil confirms...

Surely we should feel a little bit sorry for North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il? The whole world is on his case over the small matter a few weapons of mass destruction, but all he really wants is to be loved for a glorious career in films.

With Germany picking the scab of their own dark past cinematically in the form of Downfall, it seems to have given the green light for WWII to be explored with subtlety rather than jingoism by the Americans.

Based on a true account of one...

There can’t have been too many oohs and aahs when Darren Aranofsky announced he was making a film about wrestling. After all, it hasn’t exactly been a fertile source material for film-makers. From the limp Nacho Libre to the mondo B-movies of Mexican...

Plenty has been written about "torture porn", with the idea being that films like Saw and Hostel have stepped over the line of what is acceptable in horror and fetishised violence, desensitising us to the gravity of the acts. In truth, there’s little...

When a stage play is adapted for the cinema, there’s always a risk that it loses its potency, such are the differences between the mediums. While the stage is more intimate and emotional, those traits can be sucked dry by the more expansive, dynamic needs...

It was surely an evolutionary moment, on a par with us progressing from Cro-Magnon man or whatever to modern man, when the post-American Pie brigade bought a ticket to the modern world and started making movies like Knocked Up, films that could see beyond...

I think we can all agree that the existence of serial killers is, pretty definitely, a bad thing. But for film-makers, they’re a goldmine. Whether it’s Norman Bates, Hannibal Lecter or Leatherface, none of them would have been able to captivate the public...

When George A Romero gave the dead a new lease of life with Night Of The Living Dead, who knew there was such scope for comedy in the zombie genre? Sadly not the people behind this curiosity, though they didn’t let that bother them.

When...

Like Persepolis before it, Waltz With Bashir uses animation to give an objectifying distance from the subject, giving fresh scope to the the Middle East crisis that has been so amply covered.

Folman makes himself and his experience of the...

Driven with rage following the death of his lover Vesper at the close of Casino Royale, Bond’s pursuit of his nemesis Mr White leads him to uncover the existence of a shadowy organisation, which has infiltrated MI6, and has nefarious plans on a global...

Oliver Stone, the once-potent beehive-shaker who proudly waded in the murky waters of the Kennedy assassination with JFK, again returns to unseemly side of US political history with this biopic of the hella controversial George W Bush

As...

It’s now some 10 years after the release of Blair Witch Project and still the effects are being felt. Proving that you can have a mainstream hit with a reliance on imagination instead of big bucks, A-listers or over-used narrative conventions, the likes...

It’s one of the great tricks of cinema to make you give a damn about those who you’d scarcely give the time of day to. Nowhere is this more apparent than when it comes to high school kids.

From Ferris Bueller to Napoleon Dynamite, these...

The sight of De Niro and Pacino reunited should be enough to trigger the saliva glands of even the most casual of cineastes, and the fact that they do so in a crime flick, the genre that they virtually built over the last lord knows how long, should make...

Seeing how the monstrous success of No Country For Old Men came on the back of a streak of comparative meh-ness, a phase that spawned the love ‘em or hate ‘em The Ladykillers and Intolerable Cruelty, it was always going to be intriguing to see what the...

Oh Guy, what a curious case you are. Are we to take you seriously as a film-maker, or are you just a next-level David Furnish – an A-lister’s plus one with a camera?

After such a blistering start to a career which found him at a happy crossroads...

You have to hand it to Ben Stiller: he’s a pretty safe pair of comedy hands. Whether it’s rom-com, screwball, kids’ flick or gross-out, he rarely sets a foot too far wrong. And as the director of cult faves Cable Guy and Zoolander, he’s also shown that...

It’s a well-known and easily proven fact that light entertainment has the ability to affect social and cultural change on a global level. Look what happened when David Hasselhoff stood astride the crumbling Berlin Wall – within a matter of years the Cold...