Dan Says its Alright

 Materialists is, on the surface, a romantic drama-comedy about a New York matchmaker who faces a choice in her own love life. It has something more on its mind though, presenting a forensic examination of modern adult relationships and the incompatibility of expectation and genuine feeling.  Dakota Johnson is Lucy, a specialist in matching together "elite" couples. For elite, read some of the worst people on Earth. Men who demand their partners have knockout bodies, adhere to strict weight limits and the younger the better. Women who will only consider the tall, rich and in one case, white. In Lucy's world marriage is a business deal and the ultimate match is the one who checks the most boxes. As a "voluntary celibate", she carries this philosophy into here every day life and has no interest in dating until she can find the rich man who will make husband material. The love cynic is a classic trope for the lead in a movie with this set up but there is much more...

  Weapons is the sophomore effort from writer/director Zach Craggier and while his first film, "Barbarian", was well received, this feels like a clear step up. The film's fantastically eerie marketing campaign revolved around the movies central mystery, at 2.17 AM an entire classrooms worth of sixth graders get up out of bed and disappear into the night. It's a great hook but the story proper actually picks up a couple of months after the event and unfolds over a couple of days as the townspeople continue to deal with the fallout. The point of view shifts between a bunch of characters and time and space is given to fleshing out the small town details. This approach, combined with the sombre and eventually horrific goings on, gives the story a very Stephen King feel. It also works as a tension release, wiping the slate somewhat clean every time we switch perspective. The slight downside to the condensed mini series approach is that it lengthens the film with some segm...

The Naked Gun is a legacy sequel to the mad cap comedy franchise of the late 80's/ early 90's, with Liam Neeson playing Frank Drebin Jr, son of the legendary Leslie Neilson's detective from the original movies. Is big Liam quite as good at deadpan hilarity as Neilson was? Possibly not. Does this film ever completely match the highs of its predecessors? Probably not. Is it still very funny? Absolutely.  The film arrives amid a cinematic landscape devoid of out of and out comedies, with laughs mostly relegated to one liners in action films or the silly sidekick in a romcom. Fortunately, from the moment a Girl Scout peels off her face to reveal a gurning Neilson, right through to a joke filled credits roll, The Naked Gun is interested solely in making you chuckle. Sure, there is a plot, involving a mcguffin literally named PLOT device and an evil tech mogul, played with deliciously deadpan malice by Danny Huston, but it's all about the gags. The comedy runs the gamut from ...

The Fantastic Four : First Steps marks the third cinematic imagining of the first family of superheroes (not counting the unreleased Roger Corman movie of the 90's) and their introduction to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Well, sort of. It's sort of because the story takes place in a separate dimension from the rest of the films. This is Earth-828, where the Fantastic Four are seemingly the only super heroes. More than heroes, in fact, they are the de facto most important people on the planet and via science and diplomacy they have ushered in an era of worldwide peace and unity. The world itself is a fantastically realised retro-futuristic version of the 1960's, something like Fallout crossed with the Jetsons or, closer to home, a live action Incredibles. The Four consists of; Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal),  brilliant scientist with stretchy powers, his wife Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), who can go invisible and create force fields with her mind, her brother Johnny (Joseph Qui...

  Unlike say, Final Destination, I Know What You Did Last Summer is not an idea ripe for remakes and sequels. Once you've told the story of a group of people leaving someone for dead, only to be hunted down a year later in grizzly revenge, there isn't really anywhere else to go while sticking close enough to the formulae to warrant being a successor. Its not a major surprise then that this sequel to the 1997 movie of the same name does little more than tread most of the same water as its precursor while trying to reference and acknowledge the original at every opportunity.  This time round, the central cast are a little older than the high school graduates of 97 but still act like teenagers. Some of the clunkiest exposition dialogue of recent memory attempts to fill out their back stories but you're left with a group of characters you can't wait to watch die. This would be fine if it wasn't for the fact that, for most of the runtime, the inept hook wielding killer ...

When James Gunn was placed in charge of rebooting the ailing DC cinematic universe the move came with a declaration, from now on the focus would be on creating great individual movies with loose connections, rather than to obsessively cram everything into a convoluted cinematic continuity. With that in mind, here is the first of their new films,  DCU : Phase 1 : Gods and Monsters : Superman .  Glibness aside, it is just called Superman, and while there is certainly some filling out of the world going on, it does all seem to be in service of telling the story. A brief bit of text fills us in on Gunn's world, letting us know super powered people are fairly common place and Superman is the strongest of them all, before we are introduced to a bloodied Supes, his dog Krypto and his robot staffed Fortress of Solitude. The plot has plenty going on, with a potential war, revelations about Superman's parents, citizen's mistrust of the Man of Steel and interactions with "The Jus...

2025 is halfway done so its time to get ranking. Only films I've seen for the first time in the cinema are eligible and we are talking UK releases from 1st January to 30th of June. If your favourite film of the year isn't here, I didn't see it on the big screen. If it is here but low, feel free to tell me how wrong I am.  39.  Hurry Up Tomorrow When a musician decides to write and star in their own movie the results are often pompus nonsense, so the problem with this effort from Abel "The Weeknd" Tesfaye isn't that its ridiculously self-aggrandizing (although it very much is), its that its unrelentingly dull, hideous to look at and worse to listen to. The star should have just made a concert movie.  38. A Working Man Jason Statham is the perfect Hollywood action man, able to look cool shooting guns, punching people's lights out or driving fast cars. Sadly, the meandering script and piss poor production values on display here give him no chance to shine and...