The Movie Addict

This might be a controversial opinion to some but I think that 2025 has been a good year for cinema. Not the best by any means but not the worst. I personally didn’t struggle putting my Top 10 Film list together. There have been a worrying number of high profile losses but there have been plenty. This year saw Frankenstein become the most successful film in these awards. Sinners was the best film of the year but Frankenstein was the big winner with 6 wins compared to Sinners 3. Best Picture - Sinners Best Director - Ryan Coogler (Sinners) Best Leading Actor - Michael B. Jordan (Sinners) Best Supporting Actor - Sean Penn (One Battle After Another) Best Leading Actress - Sally Watkins (Bring Her Back) Best Supporting Actress - Chase Infiniti (One Battle After Another) Best British Picture - 28 Years Later Best Picture Not in the English Language - An Unfinished Film Best Animated Picture - Zootopia 2 Best Documentary - Ocean with David Attenborough Best Family Picture - Lilo & Stitch...

You know when you can tell that you are gonna hate something and still go through with it out of some morbid curiosity. Well that happened to me when I sat down to watch the third Avatar film. The first was ok and the second one was quite the endurance challenge and there was nothing that made me think it was going to be a masterpiece and one of the big positives of the film is that I wasnt disappointed. The film features Oona Chaplin and there were large chunks of the movie where I was thinking about Charlie and how her family has gone form him being the pioneer of silent cinema to this nonsense. There seemed to be something good about her character in terms of being a good villain but it gets bogged down but the ‘plot’. She does meet her demise so its clear that she will return. If the film had been about that then the film would have worked better but they decided to chuck in the thing about Spider being sent away because he is in danger to not being able to breathe the air but when...

With the Shining celebrating its 45th Anniversary, it felt like a great opportunity to watch this classic at the cinema. There is a documentary which serves as a very good companion piece exploring all the theories associated with this film which range from good to downright ridiculous. The movie sees Jack Nicholson play Jack Torrance who takes on a job as a caretaker of the Overlook Hotel during the winter months so that he can write his novel. Things seem to go strange quite quickly though and it becomes a fight between Jack and Wendy. As the movie progresses things get very bleak and one of the things that I do like about this film is that it’s very well shot. The claustrophobic feel of the latter half of the film adds an extra layer of tension to what was already a tense film. It really doesnt take long for the strange vibe to start as it starts from the flying over the lake then there are the continuous shot of following Danny around on his little bike.  In the past I would ha...

  Giant was a mystery screening (not due out until 9th January) which tells the story of Brendan Ingle (played by Pierce Brosnan) as he trains Prince Nadeem Hamed (Amir El-Mary) from a seven year old boy to being world champion. Growing up in the UK during the 90’s I knew who Prince Nadeem Hamed was but its been many many years since he was in the public eye so I knew next to nothing about him. The main focus of the film is Brendan. It’s his boxing club that we see Naz become the world champion of boxing, its his home life we see from time to time as there is very little of Naz’s homelife when he was growing up and the racial abuse that he and his family suffer. The film is a Die Another Day reunion because we have Pierce Brosnan and Toby Stephens with Stephens playing Frank Warren and whilst Stephens doesnt look like Warren. I suppose those outside the UK or people who don’t follow boxing probably won’t notice or even care. Brosnan is great in this as he usually is in most things ...

The Nightmare Before Christmas was one of my earliest experiences of going to the cinema. I remember seeing this with my brother back in 1993. I remember seeing it after Christmas and it had been snowing as we were waiting for our dad to pick us up. The story sees Jack decide that he wants to make Christmas more spooky and decides to traumatise children as much as possible before discovering the error of his ways. The character of Jack is quite good. He is seen as a hero but the repetitiveness of just working on Halloween gets to him in a way that repetitive working situations get to us all and his decision to try and steal Christmas doesn't come across as mean or greedy but something that might work quite well.  The animation is still amazing 32 years after I first saw it. The screening I was at was a 3D one and I am not entirely sure that the film needed to be in 3D. They had applied the process to most of the film as every so often I took my 3D glasses off and things were blurry...

So the first one made enough money so that we were inevitably going to get a sequel. I still don't know as much about the games as I did when the first one came out. The set up is that the original Fazbar saw a young girl was murdered in 1982 and her spirit got into a marionette and she has developed a hatred of parents because when the girl tried to get adults attention they just dismissed her.The story then moves back to ‘present day’ where Mike and Abby are trying to move on after the events of the first film with Abby missing her ‘friends’.   This is nowhere near as good as the first one. I think that comes across as Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 Part 1 because this doesn't feel like it has got a satisfactory conclusion. The line about them coming back suggests we are getting a third film and then Vanessa getting possessed shows that her story isn’t over. Other issues with the film include the ‘climax’ where Mike uses the music box to release Abby from the marionette’s power s...