Deight Night Reviews

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...