24 July 2015
A lot of people (myself included) had this one marked down as a flop after Marvel and writer-director Edgar Wright – who’d been working on it for close to a decade – parted ways. But while there’s enough traces of Wright’s trademark style here to feel bad for what we’ve lost (plus enough generic marvel superhero stuff to maybe explain why he walked), this still manages to be the most likable and fun Marvel superhero movie in a long time.
23 July 2015
For a movie that contains next to no story – Magic Mike (Channing Tatum) decides to escape his struggling furniture business for a road trip with his former male entertainer buddies to a strippers convention – Magic Mike XXL manages to be a whole lot of fun. That’s because it’s a dance movie first and foremost, and it’s a sign of just how low that genre has sunk that pretty much all the reviews to date of MMXXL don’t seem to have mentioned it.
16 July 2015
Ruben (Patrick Brammall) is an award-winning advertising creative who likes a drink. Okay, not much “a” drink as all the drinks. So when a drunken rooftop dive into his pool leaves our mid-30s hero with a broken arm, his 21-year-old model girlfriend (Abbey Lee) – who he’s been seeing for five years (you do the math) – walks out.
13 July 2015
Often the hardest part of adapting a novel isn’t figuring out how to transfer the story to the big screen, it’s finding a way to carry across all the subtle nuances that make a novel more than just a collection of events. Or at least, you’d be forgiven for thinking that after watching this adaptation of Madame Bovary, a film that manages to convey the basic thrust of Gustave Falubert’s novel firmly and clearly yet somehow misses out on everything that brings the story to life.
10 July 2015
In director Asif (Senna) Kapadia’s documentary about the all-too-short life of Amy Winehouse, it’s not hard to figure out who…
10 July 2015
As the opening footage of a sickly Kurt takes the stage you can’t help but feel for the singer. Did…
9 July 2015
For a franchise that hasn’t actually delivered a decent film since Terminator 2: Judgement Day back in 1992, the Terminator…
7 July 2015
The biggest surprise with the first Ted film wasn’t that it was funny – writer / director Seth MacFarlane’s scattershot…
1 July 2015
Minions, for those not in the know, are those inexplicably popular sidekicks from the Despicable Me movies – yellow guys…
27 June 2015
One of the big problems biopics face is how to condense an entire life down into a two hour film….
26 June 2015
Riley (Kaitlyn Dias) is an average 11-year-old girl, ruled by her emotions like everyone else: specifically Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness…
25 June 2015
This is the kind of reboot – it seems we’re now pretending the second and third films in the Jurassic…
5 June 2015
In an un-named city, Gregori (Vincent Cassel) roams the streets salvaging debris and trash – the human kind too. We…
4 June 2015
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: an older lady (played by a serious British actor) teams up with…
2 June 2015
Once upon a time, the future was a bright and shiny place to look forward to. So what went wrong?…
31 May 2015
Bradley Fine (Jude Law) is the CIA’s top agent, thanks in large part to his adoring and super-competent desk-bound handler…
28 May 2015
The important thing to keep in mind with Mad Max: Fury Road is that while it does what it does…
5 May 2015
It’s Nicholas Sparks movie time again, and you know what that means: young lovers from two different worlds trying to make it work while some old guy – or just a bunch of his letters – lurk around in the background and hand out useful advice. Luke Collins is a professional bull rider who’s struggling to make a comeback after Rango the killer bull kicked his ass, while Sophia Danko is a fine arts student set to take on an internship at a snooty New York gallery.
3 May 2015
There’s a certain kind of action movie that likes to think it’s about more than just shooting bad guys and blowing up stuff. You can tell when you’re watching one of these films, because they’re almost always set in Africa, home of loads of gun-toting henchman that movie stars can kill while feeling bad that colonialism has made large swathes of the continent the perfect place to stage an action movie – and so it turns out to be in The Gunman.
1 May 2015
The big problem with writing stories about World War One is that there’s really only one story you can tell about World War One, and that’s that War is pointless. World War Two is the one with all the exciting, heroic stuff, Vietnam is the crazy war, everything more recent has to be treated very carefully to show respect to those who fought and everything more ancient is so far in the past you can do whatever you like.
30 April 2015
Comic books – at least, the ones from the two major commercial publishers – don’t work like most other media. They’re serialised entertainment, even more so than most television, where the actual unit you pay to read (the comic itself) isn’t the same length as the stories being told. And not just in a “this story runs for six issues” way either…
25 April 2015
Since the death of his loving father in a car crash, Nathan (Asa Butterfield) has devoted his life to being good enough at maths to get a spot on the British squad for the International Mathematics Olympiad. For his acerbic, MS-afflicted teacher (Rafe Spall), Nathan’s single-minded obsession (he’s diagnosed early on as being on the autistic spectrum) is something that brings them together…
24 April 2015
High school senior Bianca (Mae Whitman) has it all – well, she has a couple of really great best friends who always have her back, and isn’t that what really counts. But then she discovers that to everyone else she’s the DUFF – designated ugly fat friend – of the group: the less attractive one everyone else uses as a way to get close to the people they really want to meet.
20 April 2015
Any film that talks about the generation gap – or even considers pitting young people against old – is treading on some pretty dodgy territory. People are pretty much people whatever their age: once you start making sweeping generalisations, you stop saying things that make much sense. Fortunately writer/director Noah Baumbach (Frances Ha, Greenberg) is too smart to fall into any of those obvious traps…
