Deight Night Reviews

Before its marketing campaign even really began, Weapons ' publicity team got some very easy free advertisement in a news scoop that was doing the rounds online. It had been reported Zach Cregger, director of smash hit debut horror feature, Barbarian , had written a new script with eyes to direct once again and the production rights for this were put up for a bidding war. The rights, in the end, went to New Line Cinema, in conjunction with Warner Bros., however, in the race was Jordan Peele, the man behind modern horror classics such as  Get Out  and  Nope,  and his company Monkey Paw. Peele had been so angry that his company didn't win the rights that he fired his team who represented him in the bid. While this story didn't paint Jordan Peele in a particularly great light, it did raise the eyebrows of many a horror fan, that a man so clearly entrenched in the modern horror zeitgeist was desperate to produce this film. With Weapons ' release finally coming up on the ...

From writer/director Akiva Schaffer, one third of The Lonely Island, comes a comedy reboot of the beloved Leslie Nielsen helmed slapstick comedy franchise The Naked Gun. This is also brought to cinemas with the help of legendary comedy writer and now producer Seth MacFarlane, an obvious fan of the classic franchise with half of the jokes in the earlier seasons of his most famous work, Family Guy , being a "homage" to many entries of The Naked Gun . With the passing of Leslie Nielsen in 2010, lead officer of Police Squad has been passed down to Frank Drebin's son, Frank Drebin Junior, played by Liam Neeson. After thwarting a bank robbery single handedly in true Naked Gun fashion, Drebin Jr. is called to investigate a mysterious electric car related death that he writes off as a suicide. He's then confronted by the sister of the victim (Pamela Anderson) and with her help, starts to unravel a dark conspiracy that leads the pair down a path of danger, threat and, most im...

With its final cinematic release of the year, Marvel Studios is hoping to not only pave the way for the much anticipated Avengers: Doomsday next Christmas, but also reintroduce audiences to the Fantastic Four after regaining the rights to the team through their merger with 20th Century Fox in 2019. With a cancelled TV pilot, a duology of fun but dated comic adventures and a disastrous Christopher Nolan inspired gritty reboot, it's safe to say that Marvel's first family's relationship with live action adaptations has been rough to say the least. With Kevin Feige and the rest of Marvel Studios' love for the source material, there's an expectation that they, with the help of director Matt Shakman, would be the first to get one of the comic publisher's most beloved sets of characters truly right for the first time.  Taking place on Earth-828 (as opposed to Earth-616, where the vast majority of the MCU takes place), four years after The Fantastic Four landed back on...

Writer and director Mike Flanagan has made his living out of adapting Stephen King books, if he isn't directly adapting them - like in the cases of Gerald's Game and Doctor Sleep - he's making his own version of a Stephen King story, with his seminal Netflix miniseries, Midnight Mass , being very clearly inspired by King's novel, Salem's Lot , and many of his other original horrors having very King-like elements - namely, characters with actual depth. The Life Of Chuck is a new example of the former, a direct adaptation of King's novella of the same name published in the short story collection, If It Bleeds , with three other previously unpublished novellas. It's one of those films where it's best to go in with as little information plot wise as possible but what can be said is that the film's story does exactly what it says on the tin, showing the life of the titular Charles Krantz (played by Tom Hiddleston, Jacob Tremblay and Benjamin Pajak res...

Over ten years since Superman's last solo cinematic outing, James Gunn brings audiences a fresh new take on the Man of Steel that also brings along with it the start of a new cinematic universe in the DCU. The story that sets up this new Superman and the world he inhabits jumps straight into the action in the aftermath of Superman's (David Corenswet) intervention in the Bovarian invasion of Jarhanpur where Superman has lost his first ever battle against the Hammer Of Bovaria. The story then follows the political repercussions of this, followed by the team at Metropolis based newspaper, The Daily Planet - namely Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) and Jimmy Olsen (Skyler Gisondo) - and tech genius and billionaire Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) who aims to take advantage of the public's perception of the Last Son Of Krypton to his own gain. Along the way, Superman meets new friends, struggles with relationships and learns new secrets of his past - all with the help of his loveable comp...

  In a vast sea of film releases that are either sequels, reboots or films connected to established brands coming this July, it's good that the movie going public can rely on legendary director David Cronenberg to bring cinemas a film that's not only completely original but characteristically unhinged to boot. In The Shrouds , we are introduced to Karsh, played by Vincent Cassel, who's the inventor of "The Shroud"; a cloak that corpses are placed into upon their burials that allow the grieving families of the deceased to see their loved ones rot in the ground in real time on their smartphones. This invention was inspired by the untimely death of his wife, Becca (Diane Kruger), who he still continues to mourn. While demonstrating the Shroud's capabilities to a blind date, Karsh notices that the corpse of his beloved wife has been tampered with, which leads him to investigate who could have done this. As he tries to find out what happened, one of his Shroud con...

Joseph Kosinski has returned to the driver's seat after the roaring success of his previous film Top Gun: Maverick , a legacy sequel where Tom Cruise's Maverick returns to the US Air Force to train a group of new recruits who have been assigned an impossible mission. In F1 The Movie , Tom Cruise is replaced with Brad Pitt (as Sonny Hayes, a has-been ex-racing legend), the Air Force is replaced with Formula 1 racing and the group of new recruits with the singular racing team member Damson Idris (as the cocky up and comer, Joshua Pearce) - but the story remains very much the same, just instead of an enemy base being raided, several Grand Prixs need to be won for Javier Bardem's Reuben Cervantes to keep his APX GP Team, from a board of directors losing faith in his ownership.  Plot isn't the only similarity F1 The Movie shares with its more military predecessor. Like Top Gun: Maverick , it's very much designed to be seen on the biggest screen possible. Fittingly, the ...

Over a year after its intended release, following a strike induced delay, Elio has finally reached it to our cinema screens. It marks Pixar's reasonably prompt return to the silver screen after their vastly successful release of Inside Out 2 with the sequel becoming the highest ever grossing animated film of all time (until being quickly surpassed by Ne Zha 2 ) as well as the studio's recent foray into developing series with Dream Productions and Win Or Lose releasing on Disney+ in the meantime. With the studio's recent successes, they're looking to make sure that the good will of the past year carries over to give their first original cinematic release since the less profitable Elemental came out in 2023. Elio 's current forecast certainly isn't looking record breaking at the moment, but numbers aside, the film definitely deserves to be seen.  Pixar has certainly learned some lessons from the modest failures of Elemental , which while having a unique look,...

  Apple TV+’s latest weapon in the ongoing straight-to-streaming movies arms race comes in the form of Echo Valley , a small scale film that tackles big emotional themes with its main cast's fractured and tragic mother/daughter relationship. Julianne Moore plays Kate Garrett, a recently widowed wife who runs a riding school and horse boarding facility in the American countryside. One day her daughter, Claire (Sydney Sweeney) who's had a lot of trouble with drug addiction, returns home after having an argument with her boyfriend and throwing all of his things in a river. It's all a bit of a joke to Claire until the mysterious and far from salubrious Jackie (Domhnall Gleeson) arrives at the Garrett household demanding the contents of the bag that Claire threw away. What follows tests the limits of Kate's love for her daughter and how far Claire is willing to go to get what she wants.  Echo Valley 's strength lies in its interpersonal drama and the heart of this is the...

This week, we lost another Doctor. After a measly two seasons, with sixteen episodes and three specials, Ncuti Gatwa is no longer our favourite Time Lord. It's always sad to see a Doctor go, but this time it hurt more, it didn't feel right that we were losing the Fifteenth Doctor so soon. Of course, this isn't the first time a Doctor's tenure has been short lived. Paul McGann (the Eighth Doctor) took over from Sylvester McCoy to star in Doctor Who - The Movie in 1996 , which was meant as a revival of the series which had seen its cancellation after over twenty years of broadcasting and seven actors playing the Doctor. This sadly wasn't successful, despite bringing in Hollywood actor Eric Roberts to play The Master, therefore the Doctor Who  franchise lay dormant until 2005 when it was revived again much more successfully by writer Russell T Davies and Christopher Eccleston playing the Ninth Doctor.  Eccleston only stayed for one series, dying at the end to regenera...

Back in 2023, Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part 1 released in cinemas to a very positive response from critics and audiences alike continuing on the series' penchant for gripping action with death defying stunts performed almost solely by the franchise's lead - in every sense of the word - Tom Cruise. Though it wore the fact it wasn't a complete finale very much on its sleeve, the film did have a more or less complete story even if it did indeed lead more into its follow up than any other film in the franchise, with the film's villains, the Entity and Gabriel (Esai Morales) being very much still at large - albeit with the latter given a big setback having had the key to the doomed submarine, the Sevastopol, and the Entity's weakness taken by Cruise's Ethan Hunt.  Unfortunately for the franchise, Dead Reckoning Part 1 did not perform fantastically at the box office. Many theroised this was due to the film advertising that it wouldn't have a definiti...

Every single Final Destination film has the same story, the main character (who's always a young man or woman) becomes the victim of a random but tragic massacre that occurs due to some form of negligence or another. The film then flashes back to moments before the tragedy begins where the main character realsies they saw a premonition of what's to come and with that new information saves as many people as they can before the inevitable. After they have survived, Death cleans up the mess that has been made by the main character and kills the survivors in the order they were meant to die in various random and harrowing ways, giving audiences new fears of everyday items with each franchise entry.  Final Destination Bloodlines , after five films of recycling the same concept over and over and a 14 year gap, finally switches up the formula with it's brutal and franchise-best opening. Writers Jon Watts, Lori Evans Taylor and Gus Busick take audiences back to the 1950s where a c...

Marvel Studios hasn't had a great start to 2025, it has to be said. While Deadpool and Wolverine performed well and kept fans happy, it has had some retroactive criticism thrown against it; that its story is barely existent and most of its quality comes from blind nostalgia bait. Daredevil: Born Again , also started off as a success but ended its first series on a somewhat sour note leaving fans, especially those of the original Netflix series, disappointed.  Of course, the biggest dent in the studio's reputation this year has been Captain America: Brave New World , which underperformed both financially and critically. It was doomed from the start with a new director who was in over his head, a geriatric Harrison Ford and constant reshuffles of the script. Now with DC Studios finally getting their act together under the control of James Gunn with his very own Superman coming in the summer, Marvel really need a win to get back in the game. Thankfully for them, that seems to ha...

After over a decade of cultivating his craft telling other people’s stories, whether that be in the form of contributing to a franchise ( Black Panther , Creed ) or a true to life drama ( Fruitvale Station ), Ryan Coogler has finally been given a chance to create his own world in the form of vampire horror, Sinners . The film takes place in the American south in the early 1930s and follows gangster twins Smoke and Stack (Michael B. Jordan) who return to their home of Mississippi to organise a huge party celebrating their homecoming. The pair gather their caterers, drinks and musical entertainment but once the party starts it attracts the attention of a band of vampires (led by Jack O’Connell) who are desperate to be invited in.  Coogler’s experience elevating franchises and bringing lesser known stories to the big screen has all led to Sinners . It’s Coogler’s masterpiece and it's already the film of 2025 so far, but it’s far and away the director’s best project, which is saying a ...