Hot Fuzz: ultra-rare action-comedy that doesn't suck

2007's Hot Fuzz, the second movie in director Edgar Wright's Cornetto trilogy, is a straight-up comedy, the first I've written up in this space.

Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright to reunite for three films

Simon Pegg confirms a new trilogy planned for the next decade, with further collaborations planned in the years beyond.

Paul: more or less as audience-friendly as it comes

This Simon Pegg and Nick Frost film without Edgar Wright may lack the ornate brilliance of The World's End director, but at least it's got real heart.

Shaun Of The Dead is 10 years old

This will make you feel old. My film Shaun Of The Dead is 10 today. Please celebrate by reading the screenplays by myself and Simon Pegg for Shaun Of The Dead, Hot Fuzz and The World's End right here. Enjoy.

The high body count in this series, and the storyline's refusal to go back and rake over old ground, means there are great characters everywhere, barely known before being discarded at the side of the road. Following Nick Moran's small-time crook and Dougray Scott's surprisingly vulnerable spook, in this episode there's a bit more of Karel Roden excelling as Marat, the Russian gangster who is caught between his country's security services and ours.

Making him tender and childlike fits with the tone of a penultimate episode that's the most thrilling yet but also the most heartfelt, as we get to know Sam and Phil more deeply, just as they have to decide whether to risk everything to become heroes.

The laughs often come with a fist-pumping cheer not far behind: Mat Baynton's line at the end of a fantastic four-way punch-up with an FSB heavy could be a quotable highlight from an Edgar Wright movie.

'Spaced': The beginning of 'The World's End'?

Having been one of the 'chosen ones' to have been able to see a pre-screening of the Edgar Wright/Simon Pegg film, The World's End, my mind immediately began to wander (no comments, please) as I left the cinema to just how much I love the earlier Channel 4 comedy series, Spaced.

Edgar Wright contemplates The World's End

As Wright explains, the pub crawl wasn't the only event from his youth that he put on screen.

The World's End - review

Edgar Wright's new movie lands a double-whammy of funny and clever: a good-natured sci-fi comedy of male mid-life discontent that disproves the famous LP Hartley quotation. It is the present that is the foreign country, or rather the alien planet, and as we get older we feel increasingly exiled from that homeland of the past where everything felt more vivid and real.

Video: Simon Pegg at World's End premiere in London

Simon Pegg, Nick Frost and Edgar Wright have unveiled their new film The World's End at its London premiere.

Edgar Wright invites his drinking buddies to premiere

The director of Simon Pegg and Nick Frost's apocalyptic comedy has asked the pub crawl mates who inspired the film to attend its London premiere.