The Screen Scribe

Review: A Working Man

April 21, 2025

I think we can all agree that Jason Statham is an iconic action actor, yes? Reliable, stoic, athletic, delivering entertaining if somewhat predictable action films with his usual sense of wry humor for nigh on 25 years now? Yes? Agreed? Good. Because unfortunately, A Working Man is most definitely not a Statham classic. At best, it’s a poor man’s Taken. Though it…
Side Notes: The Death of the Hero

April 18, 2025

I think it’s a fair assessment to say that modern culture has somehow, in some bizarre fucking way, become a culture without heroes. In this week’s Recommendation, featuring Extraction, I touched briefly upon a point that action heroes had become a thing of the past and decided to explore it in this week’s Side Notes.…
Recommendation: Extraction

April 16, 2025

Remember those wonderful days of yore when action movies were unapologetically violent with morally compromised, jaded, but ultimately honourable men? And I mean real men, hard bastards that could take an arrow, a bullet, a knife to the gut but persevere, bloody and broken, with an iron will. Cinematic icons with cool names like Indiana…
Review: Solo Leveling

April 14, 2025

It’s not very often that I’m impressed by a new anime, especially those of the shonen genre (my preferred eye candy). But I have to admit Solo Leveling caught me completely off guard. Inspired by MMORPG type games, it’s an absolute power fantasy that’s made by gamers for gamers and it really shows. It essentially…
Side Notes: Why I Watch Anime

April 11, 2025

I’ve been asked many times in my thirty-plus years why do I watch anime? Usually, the question is followed by the typical litany. It’s a cartoon. It’s for children. It’s stupid. These are gross misconceptions of what was once a niche media outlet but in the last decade or more has evolved into a powerhouse…
Recommendation: X-Men

April 9, 2025

Afters years of laughable Marvel adaptations, with one successful anomaly in Blade, 20th Century Fox showed the world (and the upper echelons of Hollywood) that Blade was no fluke, and it was indeed possible to create a mature, grounded and thought-provoking superhero film. Directed by Bryan Singer of The Usual Suspects fame, X-Men was released…
Review: Devil May Cry

April 7, 2025

Being an ardent fan of the original Devil May Cry games and the 2007 animated series, I was a tad sceptical when Netflix announced a rebooted anime adaptation way back in 2018. But, lo and behold, my inner cynic was proven wrong. Visionary producer Adi Shankar, the creative drive behind the outstanding Castlevania and Castlevania:…
Posting Schedule Update

March 31, 2025

Hello All, Just a quick update to announce a new, more consistent posting schedule for the future and what that will entail. As you may have noticed, my output of reviews has declined somewhat post-New Years. There have been many reasons for that, but I am slowly starting to come back to a place where…
Review: Captain America – Brave New World

February 20, 2025

In 2019 the world experienced the grand finale of the Infinity Saga, a grand overarching tale spanning 23 films that concluded in Avengers: Endgame. This was probably the greatest movie event in living memory, with the Marvel Cinematic Universe riding a wave of compounding momentum that seemed never ending, with multiple films grossing over a…
Review: Dune: Prophecy Episode 6 – The High-Handed Enemy

January 13, 2025

The episode opens with Valya declaring it’s time for a change in tactics as her plans fall apart. It’s a pity that the writers and showrunners didn’t take that advice earlier in the series as the finale ends just as the show began: full of promise but derailed by poor creative decisions. For the entire…