Simon's Movie Reviews

  Sometimes in a detective story the mystery is not half as fun as the detective stuck in the chaos of the story. Philip Marlow is one of those detectives. His name is synonymous with Hollywood noir and in The Long Goodbye (1973), he dives deep into a mystery involving a murder, then a suicide, then a missing person, and eventually a very violent gangster operating in sunny Los Angeles. One thing I love about this version is that this detective loves his cat enough to go buy him food at three o’clock in the morning. Now that is a dedicated pet lover. The late great director Robert Altman starts the action at a slow pace to introduce Marlowe (Eliott Gould) as he wakes up to his hungry cat. Here is a man who falls asleep in his clothes, always the same suit and tie, and is either constantly smoking or lighting a new cigarette. He is a friendly person, nice enough to pick up an item for his neighbours while going out to get cat food. It probably helps that said neighbours are five y...

  Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991) should be what all action movie sequels aim to be. Some people say less is more; James Cameron says more is more. With this sequel he pitted two terminators against each other, turned Linda Hamilton into a heroine for the ages, and just as he did with Aliens, he increased the scale of the action sequences by 10. On paper the concept for the Terminator films sounds like a low-grade B movie: a robot from the future, played by an Austrian actor with the world’s thickest accent, is sent to the past to kill the leader of the human resistance. What ended up on screen is a ground-breaking special effects bonanza that takes viewers on an epic adventure. This was a seminal 90s movie, so of course my brother and I ended up owning a copy on VHS, which had repeated viewings. Some of the action scenes were probably too graphic for my age at the time, but I’m not complaining. Whenever I feel today’s action movies have too many G-rated gunfights with superhe...

The film that launched James Cameron’s career into overdrive and made Arnold Schwarzenegger a global action star, The Terminator (1984) encompasses the ultimate technological nightmare. An action movie about a cyborg sent from the future to kill the mother of the man who would ultimately stop the rise of the machines, the first film in the Terminator franchise is still as relevant and thrilling today as it was 29 years ago. Over the past decades we have become increasingly dependent on technology, so what if one day those machines became sentient and decide to wipe out their creators? It was science-fiction in the 1980s, but today unmanned drones can fly in just about any airspace and wipe out entire villages. Just how much artificial intelligence do these things need before they get tired of taking orders from a man sitting in front of a computer? A megahit that would spawn three sequels (so far) and a TV show, The Terminator was part of popular culture in the 1990s. It came ...