The Movie Addict

  What I know about Bruce Springsteen wouldn’t fill the back of a postage stamp. This follows Bruce Springsteen as he is writing an album with some moments from his childhood and a romance thrown in for good measure. Jeremy Allen White plays Bruce, Jeremy Strong plays Jon Landau, Paul Walter Hauser tries to make us forget The Naked Gun playing Mike, Odessa Young plays love interest Faye and Stephen Graham earns himself an Oscar nomination for playing Bruce’s father Douglas. The story takes place just as he is about to be a global superstar and we get Born in the USA and Nebraska and other songs. It’s a great performance from Jeremy Allen White. I don't know if he played or sung before this film but if he didn’t then he put in the effort to make this sound genuine. Even when he’s not singing he does a great job of making Bruce sound tortured by his own doubt and quest for perfection. As I mentioned earlier, this is an Oscar worthy performance from Stephen Graham who is probably in...

Ready Or Not is a 2019 horror film starring Samara Weaving who gets married into a rich family and as part of an initiation has to play a game and she selects hide and seek and if the family find her, she has to be sacrificed and there is a limited amount of time. That’s the plot and it's straight forward and doesn’t have to over complicate things. This film is directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillet who previously directed Devil’s Due (which as of writing, I haven’t seen).  I really liked this film. I thought that it was a good idea and the whole thing moves along at a solid pace and it never feels like its padding or over staying its welcome. It's 1 hour and 35 minutes and I was surprised at how quickly the time had passed. The film doesn’t stretch things too far. They don’t keep Grace in the house and find more and more stupid ways of keeping here there and she does manage to get out and they don’t play the ‘picked up by someone pretending to be a help but turni...

The Invisible Man originally started as being a part of the Dark Universe but when The Mummy bombed in the way it did, the Dark Universe got shelved and Johnny Depp was suppose to play the titular character. However they decided to continue with the idea and instead decided to turn into a story of an abused girlfriend/wife who at the beginning of the film decides to escape and two weeks later he apparently kills himself but she thinks he has faked his death and is trying to ruin her life by convincing people she is mad. This is loosely based on the novel by H.G.Wells and he doesn’t actually get credited and that’s probably for the best because I think this film has a rather loose association to the novel which isn’t a bad thing. I have no issue with a film distancing themselves with a familiar novel as long as they do something different with it and they do with this film. I think that Elizabeth Moss is very good as Cecilia. She plays vulnerable and in complete control very well and ...

Get Out was the film that made me a fan of Jordan Peele and it’s fair to say that he hasn’t really peaked from this although Nope is pretty close. The set up is that Rose (Allison Williams) is taking her boyfriend Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) to meet her parents and from the moment he meets them it's clear that something is going on. They are trying to be too nice to seem like they accept Chris. Allison’s father says that he would have voted for Obama for a third time if he could and that being black is ‘in fashion’. This film reminded me of The Sixth Sense (in a good way). By that I mean that even when you know the twist the film is still great to watch and it's great to spot the signs. The twist is that all the black characters have white personalities transplanted into them and the original personality is still there and is basically trapped in the body which does sound terrifying. The twist also that the family aren't quite as nice as they seem worked quite well because even ...

Sometimes, the plot doesn't need to be complicated. The film follows Sarah and her friends who go into some caves in the Appalachian Mountains where things go wrong and they are being hunted by crawlers. That’s it. That’s the plot and it doesn't need to be anything more than that.  The defining quality of this film is that it is very claustrophobic and atmospheric. If you suffer from claustrophobia then this film isn’t for you. I’m not the sort of person that suffers from claustrophobia but there were times that I was thinking that the caves were too small and they probably shouldn’t be doing that.  I thought the only real issue with the film is that there were too many characters. All of them were treated as part of the story with Sarah being the most important seeing as it was her loss that spurred the story along but apart from Sarah and Juno they never really felt like they were there for anything other than being dinner for the crawlers. They tried to introduce the idea...

  The set up of the film sees Arj who is trying to make a living but life seems to be screwing him at every opportunity, Keanu Reeves is Gabriel who is an angel that saves people from crashing their car whilst they are driving and texting and Seth Roger is Jeff who is a rich boy who spends his time mainly shopping and hanging around his pool when Gabriel decides to try and show Arj that his life is worth living and swaps his life with Jeff’s but things do go to plan and soon all three of. The message of the film is that money doesnt make you happy but other people make you happy. This was a film that I was a little unsure was going to be my sort of thing as comedies have tended to be a tad disappointing (I’m looking at you The Naked Gun!!!). However I found myself liking this film very much. Firstly Aziz Ansari’s Arj is a likeable character although he did approach being unlikeable when he pretended to have lost his memory so that he wouldn’t have to go back to his old life. Than...

This sequel comes four years after the first which Scott Derrickson directed after leaving Doctor Strange 2 due to ‘creative differences’. I remember liking that film thinking that it was atmospheric and felt like a stripped down film. This definitely does have some of that. The setup for this film sees Gwen travel to the Alpine Lake camp because Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) has been having dreams and in an attempt to cock-block Ernesto (Miguel Mora), Finn (Mason Thames) decides to join them. Due to a massive snow storm the camp which is due to have loads of kids ends up having Finn, Gwen and Ernesto along with Mando (Damian Bichir) who owns the camp, Mustang (Arianna Rivas), Kenneth (Graham Abbey) and Barbara (Maev Beaty). The connection to the Grabber (Ethan Hawke) is then revealed and that three children that the Grabber killed were never recovered and finding the bodies is what the film becomes about so that they are freed and the Grabber is defeated.  There are things that I liked ...

So after the last TRON film didn’t lead to anything. Disney decided to wait 15 years because…..well just because i suppose. The story follows Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters) who runs Dillinger Systems with his mother Elisabeth (played by Gillian Anderson) as they are trying to bring the weapons from the grid but the problem is that they can’t last more than 29 minutes, meanwhile Encom run by Eve (Greta Lee) has managed it with the aim of trying to solve world hunger and Ares who is a Dillinger soldier suddenly wants to be a real boy. First the positives, the visual effects are stunning. I just loved the colour schemes and the chase sequence with Aries and Eve trying to escape was stunning to watch. That is the only time in history that the words Jared Leto and stunning have been used seriously in the same sentence.  I thought that bringing back the original TRON effects was a smart choice and a nice bit of nostalgia.  I also thought that the score was pretty good. Not quite on ...

Original ideas are very rare nowadays. Good Boy was a mystery screening at my cinema and the set up of this film  was that it was a horror film but from the perspective of the dog.  The film follows Indy who along with his owner move to an isolated house in the middle of the woods and as you can imagine things go wrong. I thought that Indy was adorable and did wonder whether a lot or some of his performance was achieved with CGI or AI but it looks like it was 100% genuine and the IMDB says the film took 3 years to film which if true explains why the film was only 73 minutes. Dogs are always going to be adorable and easy to like in film or television but the way that the film makes you root for Indy is quite impressive and when he comes across the skeleton of the previous dog it was such a sad moment. His owner Todd is suffering from a lung issue and he appears to being taken over by the mysterious shadowy figure and at the end is seems to be suggested that the shadowy figure h...

HIM is a Jordan Peele produced horror which sees Tyrian Withers play Cam who is given the chance to train with his childhood hero Isiah (played by Marlon Wayans). Cam suffers a brain injury and so it is a sort of last chance type thing. The thing about Cam is that he seems like a nice guy who wants to do well for his family and to honour his deceased father but as the film progresses it becomes clear that this bootcamp will require to go above and beyond what is expected if he wants to be the new G.O.A.T. I have to admit that I was slightly disappointed with this film. It seemed like it was being pitched as Whiplash with some occult thrown in for good measure. Strange things happen in this film just for the sake of it so ultimately this is a slightly disappointing film. It is one that has some good points but it wouldn’t have taken much to make it one of the best horror films of 2025. That’s not to say that there aren’t things to like. I thought that Marlon Wayans stole the show. I hav...

  The Smashing Machine tells the story of MMA fighter Mark Kerr. I’ll be honest I didn’t know the story or particularly interested but the idea of Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson transforming himself was something that got me interested. The story takes place between 1997 and 2000 when he is already a fighter and we follow Kerr as he tries to win some Pride event in Japan. The story isn’t that interesting which is a major problem in a biopic. He has a drug problem, tries to kick it and win a competition whilst having issues with his girlfriend. There have been better stories to tell and I wonder what it was about this that people thought was worth making a story about. The other issue with Dawn played by Emily Blunt. I like Emily Blunt and think she’s a very good actress but I did not like Dawn because she just seemed to be there to start an argument with Mark. This seemed to be the pattern in the film that they would be ok, have an argument and then a little while later would be ok ag...

Radiohead X Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror takes the 1922 classic which is a blatant Dracula rip off and mixes it with two Radiohead albums (KID A and Amnesiac). This intrigued me because of the idea of taking something from 100 years ago and mixing it with music not related to it in any way.  As for the story itself, I enjoyed it. I saw it for the first time a couple of years ago and I don't know if it was because it was on the big screen or it was because of the music but I thought the story was just as good as ever. I think that this film’s version of Nosferatu is iconic and works for this film but I prefer the 2025 Robert Eggers version. The film did try and inject some colour into the film with weird bits of red and blue in an attempt to emphasise the evil??? The choice of using Radiohead didn’t work for me. It felt like they pressed play on their Radiohead Spotify playlist and left the film running. The songs didn’t have any connection to what was going on and there woul...