Tim Robey
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Articles by Tim Robey
An odd blend of goof, gore and sentiment makes for a peculiar action comedy
Action comedies have carte blanche to be stupid and Runner is certainly that. While the plot of this bit of nonsense prompts guffaws, the over-the-top violence quickly becomes numbing. Two strangers in Australia – played by Reacher star Alan Ritchson and Owen Wilson – are thrown together to complete a courier assignment against the clock. They have to transport a liver to a young girl in hospital who has a rarer-than-rare blood type and only hours to live.
An odd blend of goof, gore and sentiment makes for a peculiar action comedy
Action comedies have carte blanche to be stupid and Runner is certainly that. While the plot of this bit of nonsense prompts guffaws, the over-the-top violence quickly becomes numbing. Two strangers in Australia – played by Reacher star Alan Ritchson and Owen Wilson – are thrown together to complete a courier assignment against the clock. They have to transport a liver to a young girl in hospital who has a rarer-than-rare blood type and only hours to live.
Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock would need real magic to save this sequel
Practical Magic 2 is the most blatant fan service in years: a blandly watchable but stubbornly inessential sequel to a forgettable 1998 romp, which starred Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman as witchy sisters. The original, a blend of comedy, drama, feminist fantasy and mystical woo-woo, was a flop on release. But after many a sleepover viewing party, it has developed a cult following – and so hey presto, here we are, with most of the original cast reassembled. Most.
Who we’d cast in a new Rolling Stones film
The rumour mill is churning that the Rolling Stones will be the next to get the lavish biopic treatment – following the four separate films that Sam Mendes is making about the Beatles. Yet-to-be-verified insider reports claim that Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood have signed a deal with 101 Studios, the company that makes Yellowstone and MobLand on Paramount+.
Hugh Jackman's Robin Hood is perversely grim in every possible way
The Death of Robin Hood manages to be gruelling on multiple levels. Hugh Jackman spends the first, unpleasantly gory half-hour murdering a bunch of people and then agonises for the remaining 90 minutes about his atonement. Neither mode will remind you of any Robin Hood you've seen before , a fact worn by this film like a perverse, blood-streaked badge of honour. Who on earth is it for? Jackman's Robin looks more like Gandalf, if he'd been wrapped in furs and rolled in mud for a few decades.
Hugh Jackman’s Robin Hood is perversely grim in every possible way
The Death of Robin Hood manages to be gruelling on multiple levels. Hugh Jackman spends the first, unpleasantly gory half-hour murdering a bunch of people and then agonises for the remaining 90 minutes about his atonement. Neither mode will remind you of any Robin Hood you’ve seen before, a fact worn by this film like a perverse, blood-streaked badge of honour. Who on earth is it for? Jackman’s Robin looks more like Gandalf, if he’d been wrapped in furs and rolled in mud for a few decades.
De Niro’s serial-killer shocker is a waste of his time and ours
How did it cost Netflix $50m to make The Whisper Man – a lurid serial killer film that is bog-standard in every regard? The answer is hiding in plain sight: up pops Robert De Niro, sleepwalking through it as a retired cop, while Michael Keaton is tucked away behind bars as a taunting murderer. Add the fees for Adam Scott (Severance) and Michelle Monaghan (The White Lotus) as the two leads and there was evidently not much left in the budget for such things as good cinematography.
Callum Turner brings sex appeal – but this romcom belongs in the bin
Some premises for a romantic comedy can get straight in the bin. One Night Only needs double-bagging while we hold our noses, which is a pity, because it also has two stars – A Complete Unknown’s Monica Barbaro and rumoured-to-be-next-007 Callum Turner – who are sexy and appealing together, given the chance. There are just so many obstacles in their way. The script imagines a society identical to our present in most ways, except that America has outlawed pre-marital sex on 364 days of the year.
Ridley Scott's vision of a post-apocalyptic world is oddly blissful
Ridley Scott's The Dog Stars asks one thing especially of its audience: you'll need to enjoy watching a mournful Jacob Elordi fly around Colorado in a Cessna plane – because he's up there an awful lot. He also cuddles (this helps!) a Belgian Shepherd called Jasper, bickers with Josh Brolin at the airfield they call home, and finds his happy place at campfires, gazing at the stars.
Thank goodness this Looney Tunes reboot was rescued from the dustbin
It’s been a long time coming, but Looney Tunes’s misunderstood Wile E Coyote finally gets his day in court in the fizzy comedy Coyote vs Acme. This live-action-toon hybrid – made in 2022 but shelved by Warner Bros as a potential tax write-off – had to be sold to an indie distributor to score a release. Thank goodness it did: the irresistible premise is very funny indeed. Anyone over the age of seven will have a blast.
The only way to watch this woeful comedy is drunk on a flight
Spa Weekend is being optimistically trailed as the new Bridesmaids. Alas, this female-led farce from the writers of The Hangover and Bad Moms could not be flimsier if it tried. Jon Lucas and Scott Moore specialise in messy slapstick, but on this occasion the levels of raunch, chaos and hilarity hover near rock-bottom. You could throw a tired hen party in a Swindon Travelodge and drum up more entertainment.
The only way to watch this woeful comedy is drunk on a flight
Spa Weekend is being trailed as a potential successor to Bridesmaids, but this female-led farce from the writers of The Hangover and Bad Moms is one of the flimsiest excuses for a film I’ve ever seen. Jon Lucas and Scott Moore are specialists in messy slapstick, but on this occasion the levels of raunch, chaos and hilarity hover near rock-bottom. You could throw a tired hen party in a Swindon Travelodge and drum up more entertainment.
The extraordinary comeback of 'cash cow' Johnny Depp
One of the most astonishing rehabilitations in Hollywood history would appear to be in motion. Back in 2018, amid the quagmire of his epic legal battles against ex-wife Amber Heard and accusations of some fairly putrid behaviour, Johnny Depp was effectively dropped by Disney .
Miriam Margolyes as a nun with dentures and dementia? This trite comedy is grating
Stuff three nuns into a stolen classic car and ask beloved doyennes of the screen to play them with zest – what’s the worst that could happen? Holy Days could certainly be worse, and any new promotional opportunity for Miriam Margolyes ought to be welcomed. She’s regaled Graham Norton with many more riotous stories, though, than this one – and her co-stars are the ones doing the Lord’s work to try and save it.
This seductive portrait of a young Anthony Bourdain is Rocky with kitchen knives
There are so many episodes in Anthony Bourdain’s gritty, colourful, well-chronicled life that a biopic might have covered. That Tony is so enjoyable, despite biting off so little, is down to a chef’s-kiss fusion of the ingredients at hand. It sticks to just one summer, when Bourdain was 19, long before he took the world by storm as the celebrated restaurateur and author of Kitchen Confidential.
This dire manga musical made me feel sorry for the performers
1 hour ago Despite years of radio silence, it seems that Netflix’s live-action Yu Yu Hakusho remake is coming back for a second season. According to a report by Tokyo Sports, the new season is set to begin filming this fall and will adapt up through the Demon World Unification Tournament arc. The show's first …
This dire manga musical made me feel sorry for the performers
Based on the wildly popular Japanese manga series, Death Note: The Musical crash-lands at the Barbican – not so much souped-up as dead on arrival. Not a single one of the 27 belted-out songs has the power to resurrect it. The show enjoyed a successful iteration in Tokyo and Seoul a decade ago, but this is its first fully staged English-language run.
Horror sinks to new lows with the ludicrously gory Ice Cream Man
See if this story sounds familiar: a suburban town descends into savagery when its children are hexed and turn into feral killing machines. The laughably bad Ice Cream Man is rather like last year’s smash-hit horror Weapons, if you tried to spoof it with terrible production values and told it backwards. Nothing works: it’s absurd by accident, the gore is ludicrous and it boasts the lousiest acting ensemble I can recall in recent times.
Christopher Nolan's ‘woke' odyssey is actually a conservative fever dream
Long before it was a world-conquering blockbuster well on its way to a billion-dollar gross, Christopher Nolan 's The Odyssey was pre-emptively criticised, based on casting announcements and the trailer, as a woke-ified adaptation of Homer. They said it would fail. The most prominent of the slammers was Elon Musk , who particularly bridled against the casting of Lupita Nyong'o as Helen, claiming that Nolan had kowtowed to Hollywood diversity quotas and “lost his integrity”.
Can a new staging of Cats overcome the trauma of the zero-star film?
This summer, London’s Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre is venturing where no venue has dared to tread this decade – to attempt a revival of Cats. The cause for trepidation is not the British weather (even Grizabella can handle a little drizzle). Nor is it the stage history of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s long-adored musical, which ran in the West End for 21 years and on Broadway for 18. The problem is, rather, the legendarily abysmal 2019 film.
This Animal Farm is so bad, it’s enough to turn George Orwell fascist
Mr Jones’s farm is now a ramshackle smallholding in America’s heartland Converting Animal Farm into a shudder-worthy nightmare is certainly one way to go with it. The misjudgments of the new animated film, directed by Andy Serkis, are so legion that it’s hard to know where to start. Perhaps the bouncy musical montages to grating chart pop, while the pigs go on shopping sprees? The hideous character designs?
Where Nolan stays true to The Odyssey – and where he takes liberties
To adapt TheOdyssey for film is one heck of a massive ask, given its scale and complexity as storytelling, not to mention that we’re dealing with one of the great foundational epics of Western literature. Christopher Nolan, characteristically, is undaunted. His film is nothing if not an ingenious feat of adaptation, compressing 24 books of Homeric epic (which I pored over for my Classics degree) into just shy of three hours.
Sam Neill's best roles, from Jurassic Park to Dead Calm
Tim Robey Sam Neill looked like a politician, yet earned our trust by excelling in so many roles as a voice of reason – supremely empathetic and wise. His voice was magical (it's unsurprising that he played Merlin for a 1998 miniseries) and his exterior so composed that it became a thrill any time we saw him get ruffled. There was something wizard-like, too, about his ability to blur lines: between leading men and character roles, heroes and villains.
Sam Neill’s best roles, from Jurassic Park to Dead Calm
Neill was best known for playing Dr Alan Grant in the 1993 film Jurassic Park - Murray Close Sam Neill looked like a politician, yet earned our trust by excelling in so many roles as a voice of reason – supremely empathetic and wise. His voice was magical (it’s unsurprising that he played Merlin for a 1998 miniseries) and his exterior so composed that it became a thrill any time we saw him get ruffled.
Did Pamela Anderson join this incest-obsessed film as a dare?
Pamela Anderson plays the matriarch of a dysfunctional American family living in Catalonia - Mubi A rich clan of absolute weirdos make eyes at each other – and worse – in Rosebush Pruning, an impressively self-indulgent, effortfully kinky black comedy about a dysfunctional American family living in Catalonia.
The battle to save Burton and Taylor's ‘dirty movie' from the censors
In October 1962, a depressed Mike Nichols went to see the play everyone was talking about on Broadway, Edward Albee 's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. He was blown away, and felt “enormously jealous” as he watched it – partly because a play starring him had just capsized spectacularly.
America's 25 greatest gifts to culture (and five we wish we could send back)
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From rock 'n' roll to Ross and Rachel, superheroes to skyscrapers, over the past two and a half centuries America has arguably had a greater influence than any other nation on how our lives look and sound.
By Dominic Cavendish Verified, Robbie Collin Verified, Ivan Hewett Verified, Neil McCormick, Cal Revely-Calder Verified, Tim Robey Verified, Anita Singh Verified, Alastair Sooke Verified, Lucy Thynne
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MSN UK
Verified
Sherlock’s know-it-all sister has forgotten the art of deduction
Millie Bobby Brown’s once-irresistible young sleuth has lost her way - John Wilson/Netflix Third time is regrettably not the charm for Enola Holmes. This latest outing for Sherlock’s supposedly brilliant younger sister suggests that sleuthing is all very well, but, when you’re a young woman, it must eventually take a back seat to marrying a floppy-haired viscount. Millie Bobby Brown bolstered her huge fan following on Netflix when she bounced from Stranger Things into the role in 2020.
The 30 best films on Netflix to watch in July
The Untouchables established Kevin Costner as a bankable leading man - Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo It’s a brave soul who would play pot luck with Netflix’s film selection: you could easily wind up with a particularly tatty Netflix Original Movie and rue the day you subscribed. Watch out for Tyler Perry’s turgidly worthy war drama The Six Triple Eight, which could send whole battalions to the Land of Nod.
Audrey Hepburn’s secret sadness
Charade, the 1963 film where the character Audrey Hepburn plays is perhaps closest to who she really was, has just been reissued by the Criterion Collection, the DVD company that specialises in restoring the classics. An image persists of Hepburn as a poised glamour puss – well-behaved if a trifle aloof. Porcelain. Unattainable. But that self-containment may itself have been something of a charade. Perhaps, the pair of planned biopics currently in the offing will achieve their own insights.
Every Pixar film, ranked from worst to best
As Toy Story 5 gallops and jet-boosts its way into cinemas , Pixar finds itself in an unusual position: the studio is now old enough to have a history, yet still young enough for it to have not quite been settled yet. Is the pioneering animation house the 21st-century keeper of the values its parent studio Disney was built on a century beforehand? Or is it the embodiment of a self-obsessed, inward-looking contemporary Hollywood that has lost touch with its wider public?
A delightful night at the cinema with Virginia Woolf – and Lily Allen
Haley Bennett as Katharine Hilbery fights to avoid marriage and gain a place in the world of astronomy - Tom Trambow Virginia Woolf, 85 years since she took her own life, is experiencing a cinematic renaissance. Two retellings of Mrs Dalloway have recently premiered; now, one of her most obscure novels gets a light, loose, diverting treatment.
Richard E Grant is rancid fun in this rotten period satire
Even the combined star power of Claire Foy and Richard E Grant, as Sir Chauncey and Lady Savage, isn't enough to save this film from ruin - Dean Rogers Richard E Grant and Claire Foy rule the roost in Savage House, playing rancid 18th-century aristocrats fixing up their manor for a VIP dinner party. The stars could hardly have done a better job – Grant especially, in a rare leading role as a powdered, poisonous social climber plummeting into ruin.
The exploitation of Nastassja Kinski
No one in their right mind would wish for Nastassja Kinski's childhood. She was eight when her father, the infamously terrifying German actor Klaus Kinski, walked out, leaving her mother, Ruth Brigitte Tocki, essentially in nouveau poor circumstances. Klaus had already been repeatedly abusing Nastassja's older half-sister, Pola, since the age of five. In Nastassja's case, Klaus stopped short of raping her, but she had often been embraced "in a sexual manner" at around the same age.
Clint Eastwood’s 10 greatest films
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Clint Eastwood’s 10 greatest films
If his son is to be believed, Clint Eastwood has made his final film. “I have many fond memories of working with him,” musician Kyle Eastwood said in a recently unearthed interview given to a French outlet last year. “Now he’s retired, he’s 95 years old. But I was very lucky to be able to work with him on quite a few films.” Eastwood, now 96, has had a giant career. Sixty-odd films as an actor, 40 as a director, with hefty overlap, and an escalating seriousness in both modes.
The story behind Kate Moss’s nude portrait makes for a seductive biopic
Ellie Bamber gives a strong rendition of a 20-something Moss - Sean Gleeson When Kate Moss first met Lucian Freud to discuss posing for him in 2002, she had no idea that it would take nine months of intensely private sittings. She was pregnant when he painted her and the nudity was her choice.
The 30 best films on Disney+ to watch now
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The 30 best films on Disney+ to watch now
With Disney+, the clue is very much in the name: there’s a lot more on there than just the classic catalogue we’d usually call Disney. Following their acquisitions of Pixar (2006), Marvel (2009), Lucasfilm (2012), and – biggest of all – 20th Century Fox (2019), the service went live with all of those separate coffers jam-packed. Many families own it chiefly for animated favourites old and new, so I’ve devoted about half of this list to cherry-picking those.
This freaky horror is the extension to hell we never knew we needed
Backrooms turns the empty aisles and stale carpets of a discount furniture store into a deeply unsettling production - A24/Backrooms As bizarre as it is terrifying, Backrooms may not be a revolution in horror, but it’s a beyond-freaky remapping of the genre. This evilly hypnotic A24 smash, about the inexplicable recesses of a discount furniture store, leads us into a sickly yellow maze that has no business being back there.
This British romcom charmed me to pieces
Spike Fearn and Angourie Rice in Finding Emily, the story of a hapless musician’s quest for his dream girl - Matt Squire/Focus Features Finding Emily is a bright and truly funny reinvention of the British romcom from none other than Working Title, the production company that dominated the genre a generation ago, thanks above all to Richard Curtis and Hugh Grant. Forget about Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill, though – can Gen Z even do romance?
Alicia Vikander and Michael Fassbender as never seen before
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