The Review at the End of the Universe
Kneel Before Pod tackles the Star Wars universe when Angus, Aaron, Natalie, Chris and myself (Craig) get together to talk about the 2015 smash hit Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens. We cover a lot of ground from our thoughts on the film to outlandish theories and generally just have fun talking about it….
David O. Russell’ Joy stars Jennifer Lawrence as the titular character based on the real world figure Joy Mangano who rose to the head of a powerful business empire with a simple idea. It sounds like it should be a really difficult story to tell and in many ways it is. There are so many…
Steve Martino’s The Peanuts Movie brings Charlie Brown, Snoopy and all their friends into a new school term as the lovable clutz tries to impress the new girl. Peanuts is the latest beloved childhood pleasure to be adapted for a modern audience in big screen format and I was surprised by how little has actually…
Ron Howard’s In the Heart of the Sea takes its inspiration from the shipwreck story that reportedly inspired the Herman Melville novel Moby Dick. The fate of the Essex was turned into a non fiction book in the year 2000. I imagine that this book is largely the source material for this film as the…
JJ Abrams brings Star Wars back to the big screen with The Force Awakens. This entry serves as the next part of the saga following on from Return of the Jedi as well as being a convenient jumping on point for new fans. This is going to be a difficult one to review as the…
Michael Dougherty’s Krampus explores the darker side of Christmas as an ancient demon comes to terrorise a family for being naughty. Christmas is well known as a time of year where people are encouraged to be kind to one another and show affection that they might not otherwise show but it’s undeniable that there’s a…
Paul McGuigan’s Victor Frankenstein tells an origin story for literature and cinema’s most famous monster maker from the perspective of his assistant Igor (Daniel Radcliffe). How many versions have we all seen of Frankenstein at this point? As a story it has been everywhere from Looney Tunes cartoons to the old Hammer Horror classics and…
Terence Davies’ Sunset Song is the first feature length film adaptation of the classic Lewis Grassic Gibbon novel favoured by English teachers nationwide -in Scotland anyway-. It tells the story of a young woman coming of age in the early part of the 20th century. This is an incredibly difficult task for me to review…
Peter Sohn’s The Good Dinosaur marks Pixar’s second film release of 2015 and delivers a very different experience from the earlier effort, Inside Out. The premise here is that the dinosaurs were never wiped out by a meteor and continued to evolve after that. Our introduction to the story shows an Apatosaurus making use of…
Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies is a tale of hope and integrity amid a backdrop of Cold War era paranoia. It all begins when a man named Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance) is arrested under suspicion of being a Soviet spy and awaits trial to determine the extent of his guilt. In an attempt to prove…
