Christopher Symonds

You could never accuse JJ Abrams of not having courage. Here is a near 50 year old franchise with more television and cinematic entries than most in the world, with a rich history, and a ravenous and...
So concludes the four picture deal that began so spectacularly in 2008 with Marvel’s major cinematic gamble: Iron Man. Now three stand-alones/and a crossover film later, has that film gotten a worthy...
Tom Cruise has been a busy boy of late: first Jack Reacher and now a big budget science fiction adaption from the unpublished graphic novel Oblivion . The writer of that graphic novel happens to be th...
Robert Zemeckis could never be accused of resting on laurels or past successes. Despite Romancing the Stone and Back to the Future being two of the 80s’ most successful offerings, Zemeckis wanted to p...
Universal’s monster catalogue had long been dormant, come the 1950s, and a smaller British production house called Hammer were savvy enough to recognise the potential of plundering those long beloved...
The anti-hero, the McGuffin, the duplicitous femme fatale, film noir, German expressionism seeping its way into film—these things have influenced movies for longer than this reviewer’s father has been...
After the fiasco that was 1995’s Judge Dredd , fans of the popular character from British anthology 2000AD would wait almost two decades to see their beloved anti-hero return to the big screen. The or...
Pixar’s first foray into fairy tale territory started life out as The Bear and the Bow , went through a change of directors—losing their first female director, Brenda Chapman to the usually quoted cre...
After E.T. stormed the box office and captured the hearts of about every kid in existence at the time, studios predictably tried their own riffs on the child/alien combo film with varying degrees of s...
When asking someone what their favourite Disney film is, one rarely if ever hears this 1950’s era adaptation of J.M. Barrie’s immortal play mentioned. Yet, it is a favoured entry amongst the entertain...
For a kid who grew up in the Eighties, Saturday morning cartoons were a heavenly institution. Six solid hours of animated splendour! And, as the years progressed, and the likes of Transformers , Maste...
A fifth outing for Pierce Brosnan was being written as late as 2004, even though the rights to Fleming’s inaugural Bond tome Casino Royale had come into Eon’s possession in 1999. Although Brosnan’s la...
One of the most frustrating things this reviewer sees every Christmas is the list of perennial favourite festive season movies to watch, and this not on it. Richard Donner took time out from blowing s...
The Soviet Union was gone, the Berlin wall fell, and the Cold War was over. Ever the product of that era, and with a six year hiatus due to legal battles over the rights, Bond’s relevance topically an...
After an eight year hiatus of major animated theatrical releases, thanks to World War 2 and lower box office returns, Disney would again take a major gamble, as he did with Snow White , and put into p...