#nic-cage

#nic-cage

I knew he was a legendary director and he was giving me a list of his movies like Raging Bull, Taxi Driver. Then he was like, 'You probably can't watch any of those quite yet, but there is this one movie I directed called Hugo.' A couple days later, in the mail, I received a copy of Hugo on Blu-ray from his office, which is really crazy.

"[Bias] is that thing that stops you being regarded as a person and makes you something smaller. With my accent, I've had that experience where I'm suddenly no longer a person with infinite possibilities and potential - I am 'that Scottish person'. I'm reduced to a noise that comes out of my mouth."

It's a great story where Conan was 40 years king...and he gets complacent, and he gets forced out of the kingdom, slowly. Then there's conflict, of course, and then he somehow comes back, and then there's all kinds of madness and violence and magic and creatures.

Boo is the small town's recluse; he spends the movie as little more than a mysterious shape, cloaked in shadows. But in the film's final moments, he steps out nervously, into the light. Duvall's features soften, he smiles slightly and the menacing presence of Boo Radley transforms before our eyes into a figure radiating kindness and concern. The pure, elegantly nuanced physicality of that moment launched his career.

The Spider-Verse launched a whole new multiverse both in the story and in real life. Sony's award-winning animated films introduced the world to Miles Morales, but along the way came a bunch of different variants of Spider-Man, ranging from Spider-Punk to Spider-Ham. Now, those characters are getting the spotlight, and first up is possibly the biggest name attached to the project: legendary actor Nicolas Cage as Ben Reilly, a 1930s detective who takes on the alter ego "Spider-Noir."

As the movie opens, the city is being terrorised by a cult calling itself New World, whose members are hell bent on demonstrating their commitment to a survival-of-the-fittest creed by murdering everyone in sight. Their leader, a fearsome killer nicknamed the Night Slasher (Brian Thompson), wields a giant, spiky knife that must be the envy of Black Metal bands everywhere.

The Welsh-born actor had spent much of the decade living in the United States, where he split his time between the stage and the screen, building an utterly respectable career. He had played a compassionate doctor in David Lynch's The Elephant Man, a murderous ventriloquist in the cult thriller Magic, and the real-life convicted child murderer Bruno Hauptmann in the TV movie The Lindbergh Kidnapping Case, for which he had won his first Emmy.