If someone uses the phrase “bad dates”, I think of the Nazi monkey’s demise in Raiders of the Lost Ark. However, I’m writing this to chronicle bad dates of a different kind; five movie-related (and in one case TV-related) romantic interactions that went pear-shaped, prior to meeting my wife. It is my hope that these tales of woe will prove instructive to single film buffs, as they search for their significant others via that swipey-appy-thingy.

With the understanding that what one wants in a life partner will vary according to background, personality, and temperament, if you are a cineaste, I…

Retro Rewind

Retro Rewind is a weekly series that reconsiders pre-2000 pop culture. More here.

My emotional baggage for E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial is a suitcase so overstuffed with bittersweet nostalgia and melancholy reminiscence that it would incur a hefty excess charge were its physical manifestation to accompany me on a commercial flight. Steven Spielberg’s 1982 smash — the most successful motion picture of all time until Spielberg dethroned himself eleven years later with Jurassic Park — is one of the greatest films ever made, with or without my personal baggage. …

Further to last month’s Dillon Picks, here again is my monthly roundup of truly excellent writing on Medium. What do you gain from being on this list? Absolutely nothing, other than a generous quantity of smug points for having found favour in the eyes of the Dillon Empire, as my criteria is stupidly strict.

Please remember that these articles are not necessarily from the calendar month, as I reserve the right to exhibit hidden gems from the Dark Ages of Medium. These pieces are from a variety of authors. …

M Night Shyamalan’s Old has been touted as a return to form. The accuracy of this assertion depends on how you define “form”. If by form you mean as moderately diverting as some of his better post Signs output — Split for instance — then yes, by that metric Old is a return to form after the dog’s dinner that was Glass. However, if you mean a return to the lightning-in-a-bottle brilliance of his one undoubted classic The Sixth Sense, to paraphrase Sallah in Raiders of the Lost Ark, you’re digging in the wrong place.

The premise concerns a group…

THUNDERDOME

Thunderdome is a FanFare series where our writers good-naturedly debate some matter of pop culture and then leave it to the readers to decide. Read each post and vote at the bottom!

Who is the best teacher at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry? I suppose it depends on your definition of “best”. Kindest? Fairest? Funniest? Or the one from whom Harry Potter learned the most, in order to survive when targeted by Lord Voldemort? By the latter criteria, the answer must be the Potions Master, Severus Snape.

From the very start, JK Rowling paints this enigmatic teacher as misunderstood…

First, a confession: I’ve always had a slight vendetta against the Purge series, because the ingenious premise — for one night every year, all crime is legal — I came up with myself, some years before these films existed. I even went so far as to write a screenplay, though it was radically different from anything we’ve seen on screen in the Purge series. For one thing, it had more of an oppressive religious angle and was set amid a Puritanical cult, who repress all their sinful urges to an absurd degree, except for one day in the year when…

I am a cinema fundamentalist. Cinema is the true faith. Television is the antichrist. When the VHS revolution came about, I was having none of this “I’ll wait till it comes out on video” piffle. Watch a low-res, pan and scan, mono version on a 4:3 television instead? Nope.

In a similar way, today I utterly reject all this newfangled streaming nonsense. Yes, films can now be seen in their correct aspect ratio in a better resolution, and yes, you can add big TV screens, surround sound gimmicks, and the like (which do not replicate the cinema experience, contrary to…

I first recall a film trailer having a significant impact on me in the autumn of 1984. My father took me to a re-release of 101 Dalmatians, at what was then the ABC Magdalen Street, Oxford — a lovely Art Deco one-screen cinema. The lights dimmed, the curtain rose, and following the supporting cartoon shorts, the trailers began. Some of these intrigued me (especially Beverly Hills Cop, which looked hilarious), but then the trailer for Dune came on, and everything changed.

The imagery from David Lynch’s notorious science fiction flop captivated my imagination. Ravishing production design, leather costumes, giant…