Paul Haine | Tales from the city

Paul Haine | Tales from the city

All articles by Paul Haine

  1. Review of X-Men: First Class

    Matthew Vaughn’s X-Men: First Class is a welcome return to form for the X-Men franchise after the risible X-Men: Last Stand and the sloppy Wolverine origins story. The ’60s setting allows for a lighter tone than previous instalments but Michael Fassbender’s intensity as Erik Lehnsherr takes the film to some dark places.

  2. Jack Marston is a prick, but that’s probably ok

    The character of Jack Marston in Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption doesn’t compare favourably to his father, John Marston, but with a bit of mental squinting I came to the conclusion that this character-hobbling was not only deliberate but desirable as well. Spoilers follow for the ending of Red Dead.

  3. Trailer for The Artist

    I love the look of this: a brand new black and white, French, silent film filmed in EYE-POPPING 2D! Both Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo were in the excellent spy spoof OSS-117: Cairo, Nest of Spies which Michel Hazanavicius directed, so this has a lot of potential.

  4. Review of Little White Lies

    A follow-up to the well-received thriller Tell No One, Little White Lies is unfortunately smug, tedious drivel that overstays its welcome for at least an hour. This review contains spoilers, but if you haven’t seen it then that’s ok because it means you’ll be able to leave the cinema after only 90 minutes instead of the full, gruelling 150.

  5. Trailer for Elijah Wood TV show Wilfred

    This had me giggling like a loon, and I don’t do that lightly.

  6. Trailer for Nick Tomnay’s The Perfect Host

    This film looks like it exists purely so that David Hyde Pierce can have fun. Also impossible to watch the trailer without thinking it’s Ray Liotta as the criminal.

  7. Trailer for Mitch Glazer’s Passion Play

    Some nice looking film noir here, and I don’t think Bill Murray has ever looked cooler.

  8. Duncan Jones’ Source Code

    In Duncan Jones’ Source Code, Air force pilot Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) has to work out who bombed a train but only has the same eight-minute period to live through each time, a bit like Murder on the Orient Express if Poirot was knifed in the chest at the end of every chapter.

  9. Trailer for Duncan Jones’ Source Code

    I really miss Quantum Leap

  10. Trailer for Julia Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty

    It’s about prostitution but it’s mysterious and beautiful so it’s art so that’s ok.

  11. Trailer for Matthew Schilling’s Avarice

    Looks like No Country for Old Men except instead of a case full of money it’s a box full of science fiction.

  12. Trailer for Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia

    A stray planet threatens to disrupt Kirsten Dunst’s wedding or something. Looks bleak.

  13. A few minutes with the Nintendo 3DS

    I only had a vague interest in the 3DS, having abandoned the DS platform some time back. Passing a shop that had a demo unit, I figured I should at least check it out. Could the much-vaunted glasses-free 3D effect bring me back to Nintendo handheld gaming? Spoiler alert! No.

  14. Notes from the Regent Street Apple store iPad queue

    I had ordered an iPad online but the delivery date wasn’t for a full month, which is bullshit. What’s the point of being a fat, entitled Westerner if I have to wait a month for something? As I was passing the Regent Street Apple shop I decided to see if buying one in person was possible. This was two days after the launch so I’d imagined the masses would have dispersed, though the hundreds of thousands of March 26 protesters might have taken the opportunity to stock up as well.

  15. Nopi, a new Soho restaurant by Yotam Ottolenghi

    Nopi is a new restaurant in Soho by Yotam Ottolenghi. Normally I wouldn’t care about a new restaurant in Soho because an important part of being a hermit is not giving a shit about new restaurants in Soho, but I’d recently purchased a new shirt with an actual collar and buttons and shit so it seemed like a good opportunity to test-drive it.

  16. Metro 2033 is a double-hard bastard

    Based on the novel by Dmitry Glukhovsky, Metro 2033 is a first-person shooter set in the Russian Metro after a nuclear holocaust has made the surface of the planet uninhabitable. I’m not big on first-person shooters — I’m a lover, not a fighter — but the subject matter of Metro appealed to me so I gave the game a go. Sadly the game proved to be — for me, at least — almost comically challenging.

  17. Black Swan fails to impress

    Black Swan, its cast and crew apparently scheduled to be showered with Academy Awards and such, is the second Aronofsky film — the first being The Wrestler — that’s left me wondering what everyone else is seeing that I’m not.

  18. Trailer for Spartacus: Gods of the Arena

    The prequel series to Spartacus: Blood and Sand starts on January 12th. I’m looking forward to this — Blood and Sand turned out to be gratuitously enjoyable.

  19. The Walking Dead

    A typical episode of The Walking Dead is pretty much how I’d imagine a real zombie apocalypse would be; incredibly boring for about 90% of the time, teeth-grabbingly exciting for the remaining ten.

  20. Review of The Secret of Kells

    Remember when you were off sick from school, and because it wasn’t during an official school holiday, the only thing on TV was day time television and S4C? If you were lucky, Channel 4 would be showing some animated films from eastern Europe or somewhere; they smelt vaguely of education but at least they weren’t Pebble Mill. Later in life, you would discover that you’d seen Jan Švankmajer’s Alice and would feel quietly smug. The Secret of Kells is one of those films.

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