Film Reviews
ContagionMonday, 17 October 2011
What goes around, well, goes around in Steven Soderbergh's Contagion, which manages the dual feat of being at once scare-mongering (hypochondriacs should stay well clear) and stultifyingly dull. Read more... |
Sleeping Beauty/ FootlooseSaturday, 15 October 2011
We first see Lucy (Emily Browning) as a receptacle, letting a medical tube snake painfully deep down her throat. Australian novelist Julia Leigh characterises such behaviour as “radical passivity”, and her Jane Campion-mentored debut as director makes Lucy find its degrading limit. Read more... |
AlbatrossFriday, 14 October 2011
This is the kind of film you would very much like to like. It’s a low-budget British effort with a perfectly decent cast who are all easy on the eye. It makes the most of the windswept Isle of Man, where so many films just take advantage of tax breaks while pretending they’re in Barbados. You would like to like it. Unfortunately, as with so many low-budget British films, it just doesn’t come up to the mark. Read more... |
The Greatest Movie Ever SoldWednesday, 12 October 2011
A movie about advertising and product placement entirely paid for by advertising and product placement? It's a Koh-i-Noor diamond of a concept, and zealous documentarian Morgan Spurlock has applied himself to his task with the efficiency of a Dyson vacuum cleaner and the tenacity of a corporate Salesman of the Month. Read more... |
The Three Musketeers (3D)Wednesday, 12 October 2011
There is nothing good about The Three Musketeers. Nothing. Read more... |
TyrannosaurFriday, 07 October 2011
If you can judge a man by his friends then the volatile Joseph would be something of a contradiction. His best mate is looking death in the eye, riddled with sickness and regret (and by all accounts left that way by the lifestyle they both shared). Then there’s the wheeler-dealer prone to racist tirades. On the redemptive side is the charming, if porcelain-fragile friendship that he strikes up with dedicated Christian Hannah. Read more... |
Midnight in ParisWednesday, 05 October 2011
Waiting for Woody Allen to turn in a half-decent movie is bit like inching through a recession. The green shoots of recovery are constantly hoped for, but slow to show. Now and then the new one will come along and seem marginally less dire, but prove all too chimerical. How many of the films in the last decade does anyone remember for the right reasons? And don't say Vicky Cristina Barcelona with its atrocious voiceover and pervy lesbo snog. Read more... |
Don't Be Afraid of the DarkTuesday, 04 October 2011
Saying that seven-year-old Sally Hurst (Bailee Madison) is experiencing a nightmare childhood would be a whopping understatement. An anxious child, medicated into submission by her mother, she’s been sent to live with her father in a spooky mansion where tiny teeth-snatchers call to her from the shadows. Read more... |
Johnny English RebornMonday, 03 October 2011
"Barclaycard? This man's in no state to go shopping!" Thus we remember the credit card commercials which formed the "origin story" of blundering secret agent Johnny English, then known as Richard Latham. Better name in fact, but no matter. Eight years after his big-screen debut, English is back, older and even more stupid. Read more... |
MelancholiaFriday, 30 September 2011
Lars von Trier wants us to see the big picture. When Terrence Malick similarly returned cinema to the cosmic with The Tree of Life, he tried to make us feel the terrifying wonder of creation as much as death. The prelude to Von Trier’s new film instead sees Earth smashing into an indifferent planet 10 times its size. Read more... |
The DebtThursday, 29 September 2011
John Madden's mainstream remake of Israeli thriller Ha-Hov – The Debt – features three Mossad operatives despatched to Sixties Berlin on an Eichmann-style mission to kidnap a former Nazi and escort him to Israel for trial. Read more... |
Red StateThursday, 29 September 2011
It takes an ultra-liberal Catholic like Kevin Smith to tear into Christian fundamentalism with Red State’s ferocious accuracy. The writer-director’s 10th is being sold as a horror film, but the only demons to be seen are those of church and state. Read more... |
The Green WaveWednesday, 28 September 2011
Four years ago a film called Persepolis told the story of a young woman’s experience of revolution in Iran. There has been a modest abundance of Iranian films making their way west over the years, but this distinguished itself from the others by being a frank and unflinching account of recent historical events, told in the form of animation. So the concept of The Green Wave should not take anyone by surprise. Read more... |
DriveSaturday, 24 September 2011
Irene (Carey Mulligan) realises just how much the Driver (Ryan Gosling) loves her as his boot caves in a man’s face on the floor of her apartment building lift. They have just kissed for the first time, and she tumbles from him, shaken and repelled. Read more... |
Mademoiselle ChambonFriday, 23 September 2011
After the international success of Not Here to Be Loved, Stéphane Brizé returns with a delicate, sentimental tale of small-town life disrupted when French builder Jean meets Véronique Chambon, his son's junior-school teacher. Read more... |
Crazy, Stupid, LoveThursday, 22 September 2011
"I'm going to help you rediscover your manhood," a self-described sexual "tomcat" called Jacob (Ryan Gosling) tells his new friend, and project, Cal (Steve Carell). And with that, the awkwardly titled Crazy, Stupid, Love sets off on its none too surefooted way. Might some equivalent to Jacob's confidence and expertise have been of use behind the camera, as well? Read more... |
Pages
latest in today
'We are bowled over!' Thank you for your messages...
