Beware: spoilers

Vilos Cohaagen in the original Total Recall, with a bloated, bloody face and bulging eyes, as he experiences decompression.

The first time I watched The Equalizer, starring Denzel Washington, it took me much longer than the 132 minute runtime to get through it. The reason was that I kept rewatching the bit where Denzel’s character, Robert McCall, effortlessly takes down a room full of Russian Mafiosi in just 28 seconds, leaving a trail of broken, bloodied bodies in his wake.

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Essential viewing

Young boy standing in front of the TV watching Jason and the Argonauts

I watched Jason and the Argonauts the other day with my four-year-old son. It was one of my favourite films to watch as a boy (on many a rainy Bank Holiday), so I thought he might appreciate the sword fights and variety of weird and wonderful mythological creatures. So we snuggled up on the sofa together and watched as Pelias brutally murdered one of King Aristo’s daughters, coldly running her through with his xiphos as she cowered beneath a statue of the goddess Hera.

It’s a wonderful film, so please…no sequel

With a new cartridge loaded into our Halina Super 8 cine camera, my sister and I once made a short film about four children who fly to the moon in a home-made spaceship (consisting of a ZX Spectrum resting on an upturned laundry basket, housed inside a small shed in Watford). Like budding Paul Whitehouses we played two characters each. My sister played Vicki and Karen (one, a chilled out hippy type, the other, a pigtailed saboteur with some kind of sneezing allergy), and I played McKell (key character trait: to exude effortless cool like Officer Carey Mahoney) and Philippe (the brains behind the lunar rocket, with a name that made him sound like a flamboyant, French hairdresser).