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  1939. As World War II loomed a widow in Suffolk calls on a local archaeologist (or is it excavator?) Basil Brown ( Ralph Fiennes ) to investigate some mounds on her property. On a personal note, Basil lived in the village in Suffolk where I (mostly) grew up. This film is about his involvement in the discovery of an Anglo-Saxon burial, an oaken ship and a chamber of tremendously important finds. The whole site is one of the most important discoveries of the 20th Century. And Basil Brown may be one of the few in the profession whose name is common knowledge in Britain: the other being Howard Carter, who is name-checked early on. Obviously in the world of films the most famous archaeologist isn’t really anything of the sort. And if archaeologists who bemoaned the Indiana Jones films, pointing out that archaeology is about careful study and the delicate recovery of items which are treated with the utmost care and respect, and rules about what should happen when such things are uneart...

Even the title is awesome. The previous film was a big success and this long-awaited sequel promised something with that date hanging there… What can become of Diana Prince in this most Eighties of years in the eighties? Before we find out, though, there’s a cold open featuring Diana as a little girl competing in some sort of ancient tournament of physical prowess. She cheats and is heartbroken to lose in spite of taking a short-cut.   Cut to 1984, and things get immediately joyous: the evocation of the time is centred on South Fields Mall. Everyone is shopping and on TV screens there’s a man telling them that they can have everything they want and they don’t have to work for it. Proving the point, a bunch of goons rob a jewellers’ shop, taking amongst other things a weird looking stone. They threaten to kill a little girl but are thwarted when Wonder Woman ( Gal Gadot! ) shows up, saves the girl and beats the heck out of the goons. The stone is passed by the FBI to the Smithson...

This story of the value of life begins in an idealised New York City where Joe ( Jamie Foxx ) is tutoring music to school kids. Even the Disney “When you wish upon a star” theme is rendered on badly-played instruments. Joe is about to be made a permanent member of the school staff, much to the pleasure of his mother. Then the secret dream that he’s always harboured—to play with one of the greats—presents itself and whilst bursting with happiness and not looking where he’s going, Joe falls down an open manhole and dies. The worlds beyond are visually weird, almost like experimental animation. And set against this are jokes about rebranding and training (including “You Seminars”)—as if the route to heaven or “h, e, double-hockey-sticks” is a modern business. Beforehand, the depiction of New York, the apartments, schools, jazz clubs (“Nice…”) and streets are all beautiful. Finding himself in the Great Beyond and unwilling to accept it, Joe escapes and ends up in the Great Before, which...

  The two Bill & Ted movies are classics of their age in a way that other films aren’t. The California slackers with their carefully crafted wit and their unlikely destinies represent some of the most fun to be had back in the day. And a remake didn’t ever seem like a good idea because the films have a chaotic nature that seems fine back then, and okay it worked twice—but it’s been a long time now and if people don’t keep quiet they’ll make good on their Ferris Bueller’s Day Off sequel talk. That’s an idea that would be more of a travesty even than another Wayne’s World movie. It just wouldn’t work. This works though. It doesn’t do anything that the other films haven’t already done but it kind of works and is charming and fun. Bill ( Alex Winter ) and Ted ( Keanu Reeves ) are adults now with their Princess wives and their teenage daughters, and when we first see them they’re a wedding band… And they play their song—which is called "That Which Binds Us Through Time - The Chem...

Christopher Nolan ’s high-concept heist movie was supposed to be a summer blockbuster to herald the reopening of the cinemas and the rest of normal life. Nolan was determined not to release it to streaming, and the result was that a massive and beautiful film ironically took the sort of money that a big art movie might coin in. It was the point of maximum regret that I couldn’t get to the cinema to see this but I am of course glad I stayed indoors. The film is a search for a McGuffin to prevent a typical movie bad-guy from destroying the world. The concept is so simple and so common to all sorts of films that, whilst brilliant, don’t excite critics. This film has been lauded and has divided audiences. It’s maybe because people are dwarfed by the immensity of it, or confused by a time-travel plot that I am convinced I’m fine with, but I’d not want to explain it completely until subsequent watches. What’s certainly no secret is that, as the title suggests, there’s two time-lines that ...