Armageddon

Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck in Armageddon

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 7 November The Ensisheim meteorite hits Earth, 1492 On this day in 1492, a large meteorite landed in a field outside the walled town of Ensisheim, in Alsace (present-day France). The flaming passage of the meteorite through the sky was visible from over 150km away. It was one of the earliest instances of a meteorite fall on record. The stone can still be seen today in the town’s museum, though it is now nowhere near the original 127kg it weighed when it fell – the locals, having dug it up from a metre down in the soft arable land, started prising … Read more

The Sixth Sense

Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense

How the mighty M Night Shyamalan has fallen since this, possibly the most barnstorming debut in the past 25 years. I’d have said “except Reservoir Dogs” except that Tarantino’s film wasn’t his debut (the barely seen My Best Friend’s Birthday, the final reel of which got burnt up in a lab fire, has that honour). But then a lot of people don’t know that The Sixth Sense wasn’t Shyamalan’s debut film either; it was his third. Those hugely digressive factoids to one side, Shyamalan’s certainly most famous film to date gave us Haley Joel Osment as a young boy being pestered by unquiet spirits. The boy doesn’t like it and so ends up … Read more