The Witch: A New-England Folktale (2015)

The Witch: A New-England Folktale (2015)
Rating: ★★★★
Feb 27, 2016Puritan Era Fear of Witches
A fascinatingly different and original work. A scrupulous effort is made – from the dialogue and clothing – to place us inside a 17th Century setting dominated by insanely legalistic religious superstitions and fears, at contrast to which there lie a series of phantasmagoric visions of witches

Ready Player One (2018)

Ready Player One (2018)
Rating: ★★½
Sep 29, 2018Virtual Treasure Hunt Through 1980s Pop Trivia
I hugely enjoyed Ernest Cline’s book about a massive virtual treasure hunt through 1980s pop culture trivia. In the film version, Steven Spielberg winds up the pop culture references by a factor of ten, which are fun to watch, but the film misses the book’s compulsive readability

Dolittle (2020)

Dolittle (2020)
Rating: ★★★
Feb 29, 2020Doctor That Can Speak to Animals
This revival of the classic children's character who can speak to animals took a critical battering but I kind of liked it. It has a completely madcap slapstick tone and more crucially returns to the stories and banishes any bad memory of Eddie Murphy

The Creator (2023)

The Creator (2023)
Rating: ★★★★½
Nov 25, 2023Artificial Intelligence and Robotics
Gareth Edwards, the director of Monsters and Godzilla, makes a genre-defining work about robotics and artificial intelligence set in a stunningly detailed future world. This site's Top Film for 2023

The Fantastic 4: First Steps (2025)

The Fantastic 4: First Steps (2025)
Rating: ★★
Oct 4, 2025Comic-Book Superheroes
At long last after several other film incarnations that went nowhere, Marvel’s First Family make their first appearance in The MCU. The film creates a wonderful retro world of 1960s futurism based on their original comic-books for them to inhabit