As reliable and grimly enduring as an East End boozer, there will always be the gritty British crime movie. Even after twelve months of some of the most imaginative homegrown output in recent memory, the appetite for cockneys getting into right old barneys shows no sign of abating. And so with a sense of weary inevitability comes Piggy , a revenge thriller labouring under the hope that graphic depictions of violence are a decent substitute for characterisation or plot. It’s not devastatingly terrible, but with such a singular lack of imagination and a grisly approach to portraying murder, it’s hard to see the appeal. Joe (former footballer Martin Compston) is a quiet loner who keeps himself to himself. When his older brother ( Kill List ’s Neil Maskell) is killed by a drunken gang, Joe is befriended by the enigmatic but unhinged Piggy (Paul Anderson), apparently a family friend looking to take Joe under his wing. Using moody lighting and an under-saturated palette, first-time director Keiron Hawkes initially manages to capture the intense loneliness of city life, but stumbles before he can amount to anything meaningful. We yield instead to grisly murder after grisly murder, as Joe exacts an...

“Sex is like pizza”, hypothesised a fridge magnet I once spotted whilst browsing a Brighton tat shop. “When it’s good, it’s really good, and when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good!” The totemic wisdom of fridge magnets, far beyond their humble purpose, never fails to impress, and this particular gem stuck with me. Sometimes, things are so good that even when they’re bad, they’re still sort of good, right? It was this unshakeable logic which saw me booking tickets to Wrath of the Titans at the BFI IMAX, the cinema so outrageously fuck-off-big that it actually demands to be referred to in capital letters. A film at the IMAX, even one I strongly suspected to be bollocks, was nonetheless a film at the IMAX. It’s still an ‘experience’ at the biggest and most exciting screen in the land, right? Right? Perhaps I should have listened to my bollocks. Wrath of the Titans , FYI, is the wholly unwarranted and largely unwelcome sequel to the shitty 2010 Clash of the Titans , itself an unwarranted and unwelcome remake of the almost-as-shitty 1981 adventure of the same name. The 2010 incarnation contained everything that’s bad about contemporary Hollywood - ‘remake’, ‘cheap...

I spent last weekend with my family, which naturally necessitates a "jolly family activity" that we could all enjoy. A trip to the cinema was suggested. Excellent! A chance to impose my well-honed cine-snobbery on my nearest and dearest. Perhaps we could catch the latest study in bleak socio-realism from the Dardenne brothers The Kid With A Bike , or maybe Cannes critical darling Polisse ? Mum spots something in the local listings. " Rock of Ages ?" My heart sinks. The thought of an obnoxiously naff Tom Cruise/Russell Brand musical valiantly attempting to destroy the last measly vestiges of rock'n'roll gives me a violent Vietnam-style flashback of the horrors of Mamma Mia . NEVER FORGET. So an approximate compromise was reached, and we lumped for a film with the asburdly literal title of Fast Girls , a new Britflick in which - suppress your surprise - Girls are Fast. Hopping on the juggernautian London 2012 bandwagon, Regan Hall's debut feature depicts an intrepid female sprint relay team team up to go for gold at the Olympics (sorry, 'World Athletic Championships' - the Olympic corporate overlords stepped in at the last minute to maintain brand assimilation). This being a...

Right down to their insistence on using a slashed ‘ø’ in their name, The Do — or, if you will, The Dø — are a band riddled in idiosyncrasies, an inner turmoil between genuine performing flair and over-the-top whimsy. The French-Finnish two-piece have carved a modest but appreciable impact through two albums: A Mouthful , a promising three-quarters-good debut of liltingly jazzy indie-pop; and Both Ways Open Jaws , where misguided experimentation morphed into something dull and irritating. Hits follow misses like clockwork with The Dø, who schizophrenically dart between likeable and tiresome, skewing ever more closely, of late, towards the latter. And so it goes live, the two-piece bringing with them a full band to realise their vision of Gallic-tinted ‘fun’ music; pop for the over-21s. Against a cacophony of summery, brassy support, the quirky pair reel off a selection of their favourite party genres, track after track, without direction or discipline. It’s cowbell-tapping samba! It’s thumping bass-funk! It’s synth-heavy dance! It’s rock-jazz-indie-pop! Such jack-of-all-trades-ery is only destined to fail, being as they are only a master of just some. ‘Too Insistent’ is a wishy-washy misfire, whilst slow and sultry ‘At Last’ is simple and effective, offering a...

They say there are only seven stories, and that all others are just rehashes; Hollywood, gawd bless ‘em, seem to have taken this well-worn maxim a little too literally. With the groaning predictability of a lunar cycle, Universal last week announced that Scarface, the much-loved eighties cult classic, and itself a remake of the 1932 Howard Hawks original, is to be remade. Except no, listen, you see, it’s NOT actually a remake, or a sequel, or even a prequel, as their hilariously disingenuous press release claimed; instead it will “take the common elements of the first two films” to create something “resembling” the originals. Not a remake. Just something resembling one in every conceivable way. Such jaw-detaching oxymoronism is usually only found in badly behaved children. It’s the PR equivalent of a toddler smearing poo on the wall and explaining to his mother: “this is not poo; I have just taken the common elements of poo to create something resembling poo.” The news is as much surprising as it is, well, unsurprising. In a year which has seen twenty-seven sequels released, more than any other year in the history of all that ever was, you’re not looking at an...

I don't know about you, but when I see a DVD with the title Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus on sale for three quid at Fopp, I'd be letting everyone down if I didn't buy it. Witnessing this DVD for the first time was something of a religious epiphany. It was like that scene from West Side Story when Tony and Maria meet for the first time and the world around them fades into the background, as the meaning and significance of life is suddenly revealed in its full, divine glory. You know what you're getting with a title like that. You're going to get a fucking massive shark do battle with a fucking massive octopus. Everything is laughable nonsense, obviously, and the first half hour provides gobsmackingly goodbad scenes. Sadly, it doesn't quite live up the extraordinary superlative-laden premise. A foible dogging many a B-movie before it, Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus starts to take itself far too seriously towards the closing act, as improbably-named director Ace Hannah mistakenly believes he ought to shoehorn some half-baked plot points about the environment into his joke of a script, when really all we want to see is some rubbish CGI...