Farce is a tough thing to get right even if you follow all the rules. Frankie Go Boom gets very close to being great – the actors are good (and appear to be having a lot of fun) and many of the scenes are very funny. However it ultimately falls foul of the problem that causes many farces to come a cropper – it’s actively nonsensical, which is rather frustrating.

Frankie (Charlie Hunnam) is used to being made a laughing stock by his older brother, Bruce (Chris O’Dowd). For example, Bruce put Frankie’s wedding video on the web, even though it featured Frankie discovering his wife-to-be was cheating on him, before he punches and then vomits on her. Unsurprisingly it was a viral sensation. [Read more...]

From the 1950s to the early 80s, the British film industry had a thriving sideline in almost ridiculously wholesome family entertainment. Much it came through the Children’s Film Foundation, but other companies got in on the act too, and through one of those we got 1973’s Digby The Biggest Dog In The World. Thanks to showings on TV it became a bit of fave for several generations of kids, but bizarrely it’s been unavailable on DVD for years. It’s particularly strange as while a lot of old kid’s entertainment is now horribly outdated and won’t work for modern children, Digby will still be enjoyed by youngsters and so it’s been a bit of an omission to have it out of print. [Read more...]

Gerald Thomas is definitely best known for directing the Carry On… movies, with a dedication to the series that took him from 1958’s Carry On Sergeant right through to 1992’s Carry On Columbus. However while most of his career was taken up with those films, he did sometimes find time for movies outside the series, such as Twice Round The Daffodils.

The comedy, which comes to DVD for the first time, is sometimes considered an unofficial Carry On film. On the surface you can understand why. After all, it features several of the Carry On actors (Kenneth Williams, Joan Sims etc.), has Thomas directing, Peter Rogers producing and Norman Hudis writing. However it has a rather different tone. For a start Hudis adapted it from a play by Jack Beale and Patrick Cargill. The comedy is gentler and less obvious, and there’s more of a bittersweet feel to the whole thing. [Read more...]

Sometimes a movie comes across as trying so hard to hit the buttons of popular success that it has all the charm and fun sucked right out of it. Meet Swinging With The Finkels. With a multi-national cast, sex and relationships as a subject, lowest common denominator jokes and an utterly predictable plot, it’s like someone sat down and made a checklist of everything that’s worked in Brit-coms in the past 20 years and then tried to distil it into a single film, and in doing so created something utterly anaemic.

Alvin and Ellie Finkel (Martin Freeman & Mandy Moore) have been married for years and are feeling bored with one another. The romance is gone, neither can be bothered with sex and their whole relationship is feeling stale. After talking about the various options to spice things up, they decide to try a bit of wife swapping. Will it work, or will it just highlight the cracks in their marriage they’re trying to paper over? [Read more...]

Ex-con Ray (Bautista) is working as a doorman when a group of armed men force their way into the club where he’s working and open fire, killing the owner’s son. While Ray has been trying to go straight, he finds himself being blamed by his boss for letting the men into the club and told he must find the robbers. As he digs digger, he starts to realise the police are as dirty as the mob that surrounds him, and his own criminal past makes him a prime suspect in the case. Ray struggles to solve the crime and to clear his own name, while also attempting to protect a beautiful young woman (Amy Smart). [Read more...]