The Brown Note Movie Review

The YouTube powerhouse duo release one of the IT horror movies of the year but though really good its not great. It's certainly never the level of originality, impact or quality of an A24 top tier entry. Perhaps an equal to the likes of last years Smile.

Fitting perfectly in with the post Endgame malaise of terrible failures of comic book superhero movies but with a Latino twist! Amazingly rote and unambitious stuff at this stage.

I thought the worst that could happen was a 6/10 and it couldn't physically be possible to make a worse Indi film than the Crystal Skull. I was wrong. Not only is it just a stupid and bad, it's also far more boring. For an unforgivable lack of imagination, a dullness beyond belief, the worst ever on screen use of Mad Mikkelsen, an awful Phoebe Waller-Bridge character and nearly no sequence that ei...

What in tarnation is one time enfant terrible Ben Wheatley doing directing this!? (seriously, watch The Kill List or Sightseers). Happily, nearly everything is done better here than the lackluster first film, including a magnificent final third.

An entirely listenable but also slight release from the greatest electronic musician of all time.

I've featured all four of the Canadian electronic chanteuses albums on my radio show and love her style, this is another fine entry, but I definitely prefer the more upbeat, percussive tracks to the slow burn FKA Twigs adjacent/quiet storm material.

Recent reviews of the new album by acoustic-led psych folk band The Clientele and the paranoid existential post Vietnam fever dream film Jacob's Ladder, both led me back to one of my favorite albums of all time. Impossibly predicting the fall out of and come down from the summer of love, whilst in the middle of it in 1967, the LA band Love created a twitching, dread-fueled, schizophrenic masterpie...

The longstanding UK psych-folk-indie band break out of their confines, with a hugely welcome tilt towards more experimental fare and one of the best albums of the year.

The fascinatingly diverse late director, Richard Donner, certainly created an archetype that has proven potent to this day, with his iconic first big hit. The modern wave of horror from Hereditary to Insidious to Sinister all crib from the mounting family dread over a possessed child, that admittedly is also post The Exorcist. What is often hokum wins here by playing it with a straight face, havin...

I sat down on a Friday night to watch what I thought from memory, was an agreeable mash up of Platoon and The Sixth Sense. I was wrong, and immediately regretted my choice. It was closer to a mash up of Requiem For a Dream and Uncut Gems. The film from my youth was far more unrelentingly intense, harrowing and depressing than I'd remembered. It was also far more profound, beautiful, moving and unu...

29% on Rotten Tomatoes for the new Netflix, Gal Gadot starring, Mission Impossible rip off, a right royal trashing. For the first half hour, I toyed with turning it off - the dialogue was so trite and the tech angle so grating. But after the film calmed itself down, it was a perfectly well plotted and performed hokey fun spy film, with plenty of action, that was less generic than I'd been led to b...

I know next to nothing about the rapper That Mexican Outta Texas but he sure sounds like fun, on this personality filled, eminently agreeable album.

I've no idea why this second album from the new wave of British Indie Titans doesn't appear to have been more successful than the first. It's certainly more accessible and the yelping has been toned down, the melody increased and the songs shortened. With a great lyrical and musical cohesiveness - it's one of the years finest albums and a worthy answer to last years fantastic Black Midi album.

Oh dear, I'm not making any friends with this one (and for the record, I gave the original a great score). Along with GOTG3, one of only two MCU (or even comic-book/superhero movie) bright-spots post Endgame and the most loved with both critics and audiences in years. Thanks, I hated it. The story takes an hour and a half to even properly start, and then it's just "to be continued". WTF!? NOTHING...

A film about transformers, who are robots in disguise.

The one true post Endgame MCU film that is valid, is of comparable quality and has a reason to be. It's also the most upsetting and extreme comic-book, super-hero film post Iron Man - conjuring up, not only horrific animal testing but the experiments on humans by the Nazi's and WW2 Japan. Somehow Rocket Racoon and his three compadres guileless optimism in the face of such horrors, makes it all far...

Alongside Get Carter and Performance, one of the greatest hard edged 70s British gangster films. Despite being hugely influential on more trite post Lock Stock fair, this is a hugely complicated screenplay, with massive, almost Shakespearean themes as a never better Bob Hoskings, goes through a proto-Uncut Gems nightmare. With deals he cant hang onto anymore than what he already has. Visions of a...

My irregular series on usually albums either denied classic status on release or forgotten about since. I'm not sure this album has been (completely) forgotten, but with the immortal duo Clipse reforming, a time to look back at what I call the best rap album released this century.

Perhaps the most valuable of the three unreleased pearls in Neil Young's archive series, this never released album features some of Young's most worshiped songs, and nearly all have ended up elsewhere, but it's a suit of songs of such quality that it would've been one of the best albums of the 70's.

Oh dear, I knew this would happen. Apparently I waffled for 22 minutes on my radio show about BarbenHeimer.

Yes that's what it is.

The 8th album from arguably the best (last?) rock band on on Earth, is still good but with less reason to be than their previous albums, other than adding another three or four great QOTSA tracks to their live set.

The universal acclaim for this collection of outtakes from the esteemed New York music icon, is a perfect example of the emperors new clothes. A series of sketches, often so slight, you wonder if the artist would be furious they were even released. Definitely not worth having.

My series on mainly albums but also films, that were either denied classic status on release or have been forgotten about since - Hamburger Hill is both. Derided a little on release as a poor cousin of the defining Platoon and a lower rent Full Metal Jacket, this sometimes trite Vietnam film builds up to an incredible climax, redolent of the harrowing intensity of Come and See, far more than Savin...

You may have heard of it. BarbieOpp arrives at a unique crossroads in movie history - with regards to the hegemony of comic book super-hero franchises and people even going to the cinema at all - but it is a good film, and remarkably even handed in its view of the sexes. The best of it doesn't seem to celebrated enough - a hugely clever screenplay and a superb Margot Robbie. Its only flaws are bei...