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Terminator 2: Judgement Day   is highly regarded as a peerless science fiction movie with a decent premise coupled with excellent special effects and brilliant performances across the board. There have been  Terminator  films since  T2: Judgement Day  but for some reason this film is a sequel to that, ignoring three films and presumably the TV series. It has an incredible set-up that riffs on Terminator and T2: an appearance through time of a naked figure in Mexico City who acquires the clothes and the car of the investigating police, whom she beats up single-handed whilst onlookers gasp. This is Grace ( Mackenzie Davis ), who has come to protect Dani ( Natalia Reyes ) in much the same way as Sarah Connor was once protected by a Terminator twenty years previously. Dani is being pursued by another model of Terminator, the “Gen-9”( Garbiel Luna ), who is even more difficult to kill than the T-1000 or the original Terminator. But the beginning of ...

The Underground, if you don't have to use it for routine commuting, is something that can be endlessly fascinating. The first visit to London and the descent beneath the pavement to get on a train and go somewhere by a (mostly) direct route is the sort of commodity that can make the wide-eyed, naïve new resident take the Aldwych branch from the theatre in order to get back to Osterley one Saturday night after the theatres turned out. Then, at the second attempt to live in London, there was another theatre incident that involved passing through a newly disused station that actually came back from the dead. At this point Mornington Crescent was closed. It was only once I'd come to London to live permanently that I learned about my first disused station, North End, which is between Hampstead and Golders Green, and can be seen as a wide section of tunnel. Taking my cue from Tom's Midnight Garden  I tried to write a story about the ideal pub in the ideal street close to the st...

O ne of the most successful films, The Wizard of Oz was the film that made its child star famous, and yet by the age of 47 Judy Garland was dead, just a few months after a season at Leicester Square’s “ Talk of The Town ” club. This film, which stars Renée Zelwegger in the title role makes the dramatic connection between Garland’s early success at the age of 16. Although the film opens with studio head Louis B. Mayer telling the young Judy (Darci Shaw—incredible) that she’s got a special opportunity that most girls of her age don’t have, even though most girls who watch the film will be prettier than her. He goes on to explain specifically how she isn’t pretty, but she has a voice. And so we move forward to the version of Garland at the time when she was forced to work in Britain. Her two children with Sidney Luft ( Rufus Sewell ) are with their father (the troubles of their marriage are pretty clear) and Garland is not able to get work in the USA. In order to earn enough m...

This Joker is very far away from Jack Nicholson’s version , and pretty far from Heath Ledger’s interpretation of a psychopath with a sense of humour , but absolutely no moral scruples. We never found out how the character got to that point, but in Todd Phillips nasty new film we do. Arthur Fleck (J oaquin Phoenix ) lives in a nasty Gotham flat, where he cares for his elderly mother ( Frances Conroy ). Flack works as a jobbing clown, and is employed to promote the closing down of a shop by standing outside spinning a sign around and generally being a clown. He is set upon by some thugs who beat him up and smash up the sign. This world of Gotham is pretty much polarised between rich people who don’t care and poor people who can’t live. Fleck’s mother believes that the businessman for whom she once worked will help them out if he only knew of their predicament. She also tells Arthur that he was put in the World to bring joy to everyone. Fleck thinks that he is a talented comedian ...