Nicolas Cage

Dream Scenario

by
Nicolas Cage as Paul

Dream Scenario is one of six movie acting credits listed for Nicolas Cage in 2023. Discounting his blur-on as Superman in The Flash, five bona-fide movie appearances in one year is quite a thing, and he is the star of three of them (this, The Retirement Plan and Sympathy for the Devil), co-star in Renfield and had a significant role in The Old Way. But we all know Cage’s tendency to turn up in any old rubbish, especially when a marriage has gone south, or property investments have turned to water. Rest assured, Dream Scenario isn’t the sort of Cage movie where he ships in, gesticulates wildly and ships out again. Nor is … Read more

The Retirement Plan

by
Nicolas Cage

It’s Nicolas Cage’s turn to have a go with the very particular set of skills, in The Retirement Plan, a gonzo action comedy that’ll be familiar if you’ve seen any of the Liam Neeson outings as an all-action seeker of payback, or any of the Keanu Reeves’s incarnations as John Wick. That, apparently, was writer/director Tim Brown’s original idea – imagine John Wick finally, eventually, retired, 20 years older and living on a sunny island and being called back into action by some untoward event. The event that does it here isn’t the killing of a pet dog but the arrival on the Cayman Islands, where Matt Robbins (Cage) has been retired for … Read more

Dark aka Dying of the Light Director’s Cut

by
Nicolas Cage as Evan Lake

Dark is writer/director Paul Schrader’s cut of Dying of the Light, the 2014 spy thriller that was taken from him, re-edited, de-kinked and reworked into something more akin to what the studio wanted – a Bourne movie. Schrader was not happy about it at the time and you might remember him, his stars Nicolas Cage and Anton Yelchin and executive producer Nicolas Winding Refn all posing for pictures in matching T shirts bearing the “non-disparagement” clause in their contracts, which prevented them from saying anything bad about the movie. Point made, point taken. Originally Refn had been meant to direct the film, with Harrison Ford starring and Channing Tatum in the Yelchin role. But … Read more

Renfield

by
Dracula cackles over Renfield

Universal’s ongoing attempt to build a cinematic universe to rival (in its dreams) Marvel’s or even DC’s continues with Renfield, which has a task all of its own – how to get Dracula’s familiar into the spotlight all on his own, without his master stealing his thunder. Even casting handsome, likeable Nicholas Hoult as Renfield it’s an impossible task and you’ve got to question the wisdom of getting Nicolas Cage in to play Dracula. Here’s a man who needs no invitation to overdo it being handed the keys to the scenery-chewing kingdom. And Cage runs wild in it, giving a performance of manically comic proportions. The premise: after a disastrous encounter with some … Read more

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent

by
Nick Cage makes the palm hold fist salute

Hell yeh – The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is that sort of movie, a brash, fun one-joke affair with a concept strong enough to keep itself motoring until about half an hour from the end. Your mileage may vary. The joke comes in two versions. One is the Larry David one about a person playing a near-facsimile of themselves. Nicolas Cage here plays Nick (note extra “k”) Cage, a mega-acting legend who decides to pack it all in and then ends up in a real-life version of a Nicolas Cage movie – Con Air variety. The second iteration is borrowed from Adaptation (which Cage also starred in) and features a younger Cage double … Read more

Pig

by
The pig and Nicolas Cage

“John Wick with a Pig” is how Pig, starring Nicolas Cage, is often described. Fair enough, even if that only really works as a shorthand if you’ve got a big bag of “buts” handy. Admittedly, the plot is strangely similiar – loner loses favourite animal and goes on a payback jag. But though Cage and Keanu Reeves are both boomers from 1964, the similarities end there – Cage is a “big” actor embracing the extra texture that age brings, Reeves is more minimalist and doing his best to ignore it. Either way, this is a vastly entertaining odd-couple comedy served straight. And that’s another thing – this is a buddy movie, whereas the … Read more

Adaptation.

by
Nicolas Cage as Charlie and Donald Kaufman

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 21 February The New Yorker launches, 1925 On this day in 1925, The New Yorker magazine was launched by Harold Ross and Jane Grant. Intended as a cosmopolitan magazine for the urban sophisticate – and those who aspired so to be – it started out as a broadly humorous publication, though quickly shifted its focus towards quality fiction and long-form journalism, though its cartoons have remained a key feature. Unafraid to be thought of as intelligent, educated and interested in a magazine world that largely pretends to the opposite, it could take its pick of a certain type of writer – … Read more

Drive Angry

by
Obligatory slo-mo explosion shot with an unconcerned Nicolas Cage in Drive Angry

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 7 January Nicolas Cage born, 1964 On this day in 1964, Nicolas Coppola was born. The son of a literature professor and a choreographer, Cage is the grandson of Carmine Coppola, another of whose sons is Francis Ford Coppola (which makes the director his uncle). Cage decided that trading on the family name wasn’t for him, so changed his surname to Cage, though he was happy enough to take a leg-up by taking a role in Coppola’s cult item Rumble Fish. One of the most prolific actors in Hollywood, Cage is also one of its biggest earners and alternates between what … Read more

The Family Man

by
Tea Leoni and Nicolas Cage in The Family Man

On with the florid jumper, down with the heavy meat-based meal and away we go for Christmas. Oh no it isn’t, I hear you shouting. See, you’re getting it. But, inexplicably, when this festive-themed movie was released in the UK on DVD, it was decided that the middle of the summer was the time to do it. Windows, that’s the reason – the scheduling slots decreed by the suits to give the cinemas time to milk the product first, before the home entertainment departments get their hands on the big cash-laden teat. It’s that sort of film too – two sets of concerns vie for a hold on the central character, played by … Read more