Picturenose

Best of Impossible worlds?
Domesticity beckons for everyone’s favourite ’super-spy’ Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) - he has turned his back on active duty and is now training new IMF (Impossible Mission Force) agents.

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This news article celebrates the hundredth submission to Picturenose, and comes with a big thank you to all our readers and partners. We very much enjoy doing this and knowing it’s getting bigger and bigger gives us a great big grin on our faces.

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End of the ‘X’ factor?
So, with the passing of all the fin de siècle angst that in no small degree provided the inspiration for Chris Carter’s (at times) seminal sci-fi/horror show The X-Files, are we left with very much to maintain the mood ten years on from the first film The X-Files: Fight the Future (1998) and six years after the end of the TV series?

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So, it becomes reality. The production I was whining on about in an earlier article has finally hit the trailers scene. The completely unnecessary remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) is almost upon us.

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Bone shaker
A bona fide horror flick, The Skeleton Key is the suspenseful tale of young Caroline Ellis (Kate Hudson), a hospice carer who, disillusioned with the easy-come-easy-go attitude at the New Orleans hospital where she’s been working, lands a job at a fading mansion an hour up the road. There, she meets the cranky Violet Devereaux (Gena Rowlands) and her paralysed, dying husband Ben (John Hurt). Despite Violet’s reservations about our gal, the couple’s lawyer, Luke (Peter Sarsgaard) is on hand to help convince the matriarch that her prospective employee is more than just a city slicker. However, in the best tradition of Southern gothic, the house holds secrets - and some doors were meant never to be opened, even if you do have a skeleton key…

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The Knight is always darkest just before the dawn…

We’ve come a long way from Zok!, Pow! and Splat! The Batman has always been a bit of an outsider in the comic-book realm. He has no special magical powers, relying instead on his wits, instincts and physical strength to fight crime, alongside some impressive gadgetry.

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Store men
In an effort to be absolutely bang up-to-date here on Picturenose, I thought it would be a good idea to review a movie I managed to miss for a good 14 years. I don’t think it necessarily matters, though. You could see it for the first time tomorrow and it would be certain to entertain you in some way. While certain topics are hardly current (the quite delicious discussion of The Return of the Jedi (1983) for example), the dialogue really is the selling point for this ultra-low budget affair, which cost only around $54,000 to produce.

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Aaaarrrgh!
For this reviewer’s pieces-of-eight, while it is perhaps pointless to nitpick at one of the greatest trilogies in Summer blockbuster history, director Gore Verbinski’s second stab, Dead Man’s Chest (2006), is now officially the Pirates of the Carribean franchise’s finest hour. When a sequel was this good (remember the treats we had? An incredible sword-fight on a loose rotating water wheel, Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley) doing the nasty on poor old Captain Jack Sparrow (he wishes), Bill Nighy as ‘ol Squid Face Davy Jones and his pet Kraken, and, of course, the surprise comeback of Captain Barbossa, the magisterial Geoffrey Rush), it was always going to be very difficult to top.

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Center does not hold
Former enfant terrible Oliver Stone would appear to have re-embraced the American Way but World Trade Center (2006), while graced with powerful performances and a life-affirming core narrative, suffers from biased perspectives and a sluggish middle section.

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Punching out

Thirty-two years have now passed since Rocky first went the distance with Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) in 1976. Rocky, the story of Sylvester Stallone’s likeable no-hoper, written by Stallone and directed by John G. Avildsen, took the Best Picture Oscar and thus was a legend, and of course a franchise, born.

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