Barnaby Turner

WHAT I LIKED: The thing that's engaging about Roger Donaldson and Robert Garland's Washington-based thriller 'No Way Out,' is that it's about a character who knows he's being set up to take the fall for another, so you're rooting for him to expose... Read the full review »

WHAT I LIKED: Richard Lester's 'A Hard Day's Night,' follows The Beatles' interactions with hoards of wild young fans and a bunch of disapproving, hypocritical old folk whilst on a fictional tour from Liverpool to London. We see the band dancing a... Read the full review »

WHAT I LIKED: There were many problems with 'Crimes of Grindelwald,' but prime among them was the fact that its story had no compelling central drive, so the film was instead made up of disconnected subplots to introduce various different characte... Read the full review »

WHAT I LIKED: Sean Baker is basically cinema's Louis Theroux, as his films tend to simply and objectively point their cameras at amusing, unusual smalltown American realities, and all you can do is sit there trying to figure the characters out. Hi... Read the full review »

WHAT I LIKED: Very unlike the rest of his work, Martin Scorsese's 'Shutter Island,' is a film where you spend half of your time on the edge of your seat trying to figure out what's going on, and the other half waiting for the central character to... Read the full review »

WHAT I LIKED: Giving an awkward teenager super-powers is a brilliant idea because it magnifies the typical coming-of-age struggle that comes with new responsibilities and finding a place in the world. Almost every move of Sam Raimi's 'Spider-Man,... Read the full review »

WHAT I LIKED: The great challenge for any story - or indeed debate - about political ideas is to connect collective, theoretical arguments to people's nuanced realities. After all, as the opening lines of the Wachowski's 'V for Vendetta,' state, "... Read the full review »

WHAT I LIKED: It is true that there's more social commentary in Roland Emmereich's 'White House Down,' than you might expect, as the story's attempted take-down of its anti-war president (Jamie Foxx) turns out to be the work of his political rival... Read the full review »