Chris Rogers

With a fully-armed and operational Star Wars franchise in play, cinematic portrayals of the great unknown which don’t belong to a galaxy far, far away have truly had their work cut out. Financially and in terms of sheer screen space, the Skywalker saga (and its various spin-offs) has dominated the sci-fi landscape.

In James Gray’s new odyssey, space travel is a commercialised, militarised venture. Humans make flights to the moon on a routine basis (paying the requisite $125 dollars for a blanket and pillow), and astronauts are no longer figures of aspiration, but placid drones of the austere ‘Space Command’. […]

Director Andy Muschietti returns to helm this conclusion to It, Stephen King’s tale of a metamorphosing monster that preys on the fears of children. Lone scribe Gary Dauberman (The Nun, Annabelle Comes Home) takes up screenplay duties without Chapter One writers Chase Palmer and Cary Fukunaga, and [...]

Tom Linay is joined by film journalist Chris Rogers to discuss the biggest films of August, and the upcoming slate for September. Plus, a brief divergence to discuss whether clowns are *actually* all that scary.

This weekend, The Walt Disney Company’s biennial expo, D23, opened its doors in Anaheim, California.
With a sizeable chunk of the house of mouse’s plans for Marvel Studios unveiled earlier this summer at San Diego Comic Con, eyes were largely trained[...]

‘Cable guys do this all the time’ declares Haley (Kaya Scodelario) as she prepares to descend a dank basement staircase. Well, I’m willing to bet those cable guys never had to deal with an oncoming hurricane, burst water mains or say [...]

The golden American summer of 1969 is currently enjoying a moment in the spotlight, thanks largely to the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing (celebrated in recent documentaries Apollo 11 and Armstrong, alongside commemorative television programming). Despite war raging in Vietnam and[…]

Continuing cinema’s recent love affair with the late sixties (Apollo 11, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood), Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark takes place in small-town America, 1968.

High-schooler Stella (Zoe Margaret Colletti) is not[...]

If there’s one thing The LEGO Movie taught us, it’s that a multimillion-dollar film based on a ludicrously profitable toy property need not be as soulless as the executives who gave it the green light. How disappointing, then, to report that Playmobil: The Movie is bereft of the creativity and imagination abundant […]

It’s become something of a cheap gag amongst certain critical fraternities to mock the Fast and Furious franchise for its constant refrain towards "family". Across nearly two decades and nine (soon to be ten) films, “We’re a family” [...]

If nothing else, The Current War - a largely incomprehensible account of Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse’s battle for control of America’s electricity - can be credited with creating an entirely new genre: the anti-drama. Utterly devoid of any motivation or stakes (conceivable, relatable or entertaining)[...]

It seems remarkable that only fifty years after the first moon landing do we finally have footage of the event that feels worthy of its tremendous legacy. Many feature adaptations (most recently Damien Chazelle’s sublime First Man, to which this will make a fine companion alongside Al Reinert’s melancholic [...]

This week sees the release of Yesterday, the new film and first collaboration from director Danny Boyle and writer Richard Curtis. The film (a light-hearted comedy about a man who wakes up one day in a world without The Beatles) is Boyle’s first since T2 Trainspotting. Even without the next James Bond picture [...]

The first sound effect in Peter Strickland’s bizarre new film - his best yet - is a switchblade knife flicking into position. Precise, with the promise of violence - emblematic of the English director’s signature stylings,[...]

Disney’s latest live-action remake feels the most manufactured yet; a production-line retread with the weakest of new additions to justify its existence (and bloated running time). Unlike previous retellings of Cinderella, The Jungle Book, Beauty and the Beast and even this year’s lacklustre Dumbo, the singular voice of its director[...]