Simon's Movie Reviews

Another year, another instance of reviewing a movie made by a director with a rather dubious personal history. Ever since the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke out last year I realize there are plenty of movies on this Greatest Movies list whose crew includes directors, producers, writers or actors who have been accused of sexual misconduct/lewd behaviour/rape/being a complete scumbag. Woody Allen directed Annie Hall (1977), arguably one of his funniest movies of all times, but he was also accused of sexual abuse as far back as the early 90s and kept on working. I am a completionist and Annie Hall is next on my list, so I am going to have press on and try to look back at this movie by separating the artist from the work. This is a little bit tricky with a Woody Allen movie since in most of his movies he likes to write, direct, and be in front of the camera in the lead role. In Annie Hall his character is comedian Alvy Singer, a prototypical New Yorker as in many of Allen’s movies...

I am often asked what’s my favourite movie. I usually answer with a well-regarded classic, such as Fargo , The Godfather, or The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly . However in full honesty Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993) is probably the one movie that really affected me the most the first time I saw it, despite the fact that, let’s face it, it is not perfect. It makes no sense for an island full of dinosaurs to be nearly evacuated for the weekend, and the science is pretty questionable. Yet maybe because I was around six years old when I first saw it, that movie has left one big dinosaur paw-shaped print in my mind. In this age of CGI and grand-scale summer movies it is easy to forget what an adrenaline-injection this movie was. Dinosaurs had been featured in movies before, but they mostly looked like giant puppets. Steven Spielberg and the effects wizards at Industrial Light & Magic in collaboration with animatronics by Stan Winston were the first guys who managed to con...