Flickering Myth

Geek Culture | Movies, TV, Comic Books & Video Games

Tom Jolliffe

Propelled to Greatness by Set Pieces: A Maverick Approach to Action Cinema

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Tom Jolliffe looks at two of the best action films of the last decade, Mad Max: Fury Road and Top Gun: Maverick… There are great films. There are great action films. Attaining greatness through your action amounts to nailing your set pieces and imbuing proceedings, with just enough characterisation to give the propellant action some […]

Cage as Cage, Van Damme as Van Damme: Two Icons Play Their Ultimate Role

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Tom Jolliffe looks at Nic Cage in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, and compares with Jean-Claude Van Damme’s temporarily redefining role as himself in JCVD… April 2022 included a special day for me. It was something of an event. I got to see Nicolas Cage strut his stuff on the big screen. Maybe 10-15 […]

Northman the Barbarian: How Conan Courses Through The Northman

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Tom Jolliffe looks at the similarities between The Northman and Conan the Barbarian. Spoilers follow… After success and masses of acclaim for his small scale masterworks The Witch and The Lighthouse, director Robert Eggers went large scale in his third outing. The Northman is a big budget Viking revenge epic. In every way, it’s the […]

The Art of Ambiguity in Cinema

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Tom Jolliffe looks at the finest in ambiguous cinema, and asks ‘how do you pull it off?’…  Often in the law books of screenwriting there’s a section which might tell the studious aspiring writer that a film must have clarity. Plot threads must lead to resolution. Each act and your central character arcs should be […]

The Return of the Raging Boll!

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Tom Jolliffe on the prospect of Uwe Boll returning to the director’s chair… In modern cinema, at a time when mega budget studio films are absorbing most of the finance and the vast majority of cinema exhibition space, there has been a shift in the medium. Cinema started as a place of creative expression, where […]

The Must Watch Korean Films of Cannes 2022

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Tom Jolliffe looks ahead to three absolutely must watch Korean films about to hit Cannes… South Korean film and TV has boomed in worldwide appeal in recent years. The Oscars success of Parasite was followed by the all consuming power of Squid Game, which was THE water cooler series of 2021. The nation appears to […]

The Box Office Problem: The Desertion of the Cinephiles

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Tom Jolliffe looks at the disappointing box office returns for The Northman and The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, and the possible implications for cinema… The box office has been improving of late. We’re getting back to a stage of careful optimism and growth closer to the kind of numbers which films were pulling in […]

The Essential Action Movies of the 21st Century

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Tom Jolliffe offers up a list of essential 21st Century action films… As an action aficionado and self-confessed old git, I quietly nod in a small amount of agreement with Ridley Scott and Martin Scorsese’s Marvel/modern cinema shade. I grew up in an era when action was performed almost entirely in camera, with an eye […]

The Crow: A Cursed and Unnecessary Reboot

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Tom Jolliffe looks at the perpetually delayed reboot of The Crow and why it’s both cursed and unnecessary… The uninspired Hollywood reboot. It’s not a new phenomenon, but certainly in the last 15 years, there have been innumerable examples of cinematic reboots. It’s not always the case that the primo IPs, which bring with them […]