Dan Says its Alright

Whatever your opinion of David Gordon Green's Halloween trilogy its hard to deny he took a big swing at it and The Exorcist: Believer has a lot in common with the director's 2018 revitalisation of that franchise. Like Halloween 2018 this film ignores every previous sequel and is a direct follow up to the original Exorcist. Like Halloween 2018 this film sticks pretty closely to beats of the original but with heightened stakes (more kills for Halloween, twice the number of possessed kids here). Unlike Halloween 2018 this film isn't a complete success. Not that The Exorcist: Believer is a write off by any means. Having two friends be possessed is a nice way of distinguishing proceedings from the sea of other possession films we have seen over the last few years and adds an extra layer to dealing with the situation, not only does the worried father need to deal with what is happening to his daughter but also with another family and their beliefs on what should be done. The pos...

  The Creator delivers big budget looks and scale infused with philosophical ideas, making it the kind of blockbuster film making people who decry the modern glut of franchise fodder will constantly tell you is missing from the big screen. Naturally it ended up playing to mostly empty theatres.  The central plot revolves around AI.  Not the take your job, destroy creative industries and push propaganda kind that is depressing everyone in the news right now but good old sci fi robotic humanoids. Banned in the West after a nuclear incident they have taken refuge in "NewAsia" prompting the US to wage war across the Pacific, causing terror with a massive orbital battle station called the NOMAD. When word emerges the AI may have a new super weapon of their own John David Washington's bitter ex Army Sergeant Joshua Taylor is recruited to help a crack team go and eliminate the problem. When he discovers the "weapon" is a synthetic child he takes it on the run in the h...

The challenge for Dumb Money is how to make a story about stocks interesting, especially when anyone interested either already knows what happened or can easily look up the events. The answer given here is to focus on some great characters played by grade A actors.  The story is a simple one, albeit one seasoned with odd bit of financial jargon. Way back in pandemic times (2021) a low rung financial investor called Keith Gill led a Reddit driven movement to buy up stock in video game retail chain Gamestop, massively driving up its share price and giving investors a huge return. This sparks a backlash from the big finance institutions betting on the companies demise. Paul Dano plays Gill with Seth Rogan, Vincent D'Onofrio and Nick Offerman appearing as real life Wall Street investors alongside some made up "average Joe" characters portrayed by America Ferrera, Anthony Ramos and others. When every character is introduced we see their net worth, from the multiple billions ...

  A Haunting in Venice sees Kenneth Branagh strut his stuff as legendary detective Hercule Poirot for a third time and it just might be his best outing yet.  Unlike Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile we aren't sticking closely to an original Agatha Christie book this time round, with screenwriter Micheal Green building his own tale around the very loose bones of lesser known Poirot story Hallowe'en Party. This allows the script to written in a way directly suited for film, weaving twists and turns into a compelling mystery and layering in some meditations on spirituality and purpose. There are even some light horror elements with the possibility that real ghosts may be involved in the goings on. The movie begins with an aged Poirot (the film is set ten years after Death on the Nile) living in Venice as a recluse with a security guard keeping at bay dozens of people looking for the famous detectives help. An old friend visits and convinces him to help here expos...

  The original DCEU utters it's last wheeze with Blue Beetle , a film with just about enough character to avoid being the most generic superhero movie of all time. Emphasis on just about.  It really should be better than it is since it has plenty of elements that ought to add up to a fun super hero caper. The focus is on a whole family rather than yet another lone outsider, it puts a different culture front and centre and it leans (or at least tries to) into the bright and silly side of the genre. Unfortunately so many parts of the movie feel like they've been given the absolute minimal effort. The story sees Jamie Reyes return to his home city after graduating law school to find out his family are facing eviction. He takes a job with his sister at the mansion of an industrial CEO and promptly gets them both fired but ends up in possession of "The Scarab", an alien super weapon that is basically a sentient Iron Man suit. Naturally the evil corpora...

The Equalizer 3 is Denzel Washington's third turn as score leveller Robert McCall and it just might be the best one yet. At an hour and forty nine minutes its the trimmest of the vigilante's adventures and restricting the action (mostly) to a single Italian village gives proceedings a unique feel and bats away any sense of franchise fatigue. After an opening that sees McCall badly wounded while brutalising some criminal types at a remote farm he ends up recuperating in an idyllic Italian village where he is suitably charmed by the locals who help him and has to decide how far he is willing to go to protect them from the vicious local mafia.  In addition to giving the film a completely different look from the previous instalments, the change in setting allows for a change in focus. Taking on local criminals feels less grand than the facing off against government agents of The Equalizer 2 and, despite the stakes being less directly personal this time round, we see more of McCal...