18 April 2015
When a freak car accident leaves Adaline Bowman (Blake Lively) forever frozen at 29 years old, her life eventually becomes little more than a series of chores. Unable to form any long-term relationships or settle down in any one place for too long – she has to start all over again every decade or so – she’s become happy with merely existing.
16 April 2015
It’s been a long road for the Fast & Furious franchise, but for our heroes – now whittled down to the core cast of Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel), Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker), Letty Ortiz (Michelle Rodriguez), Roman Pearce (Tyrese Gibson) and Tej Parker (Chris “Ludacris” Bridges), with Mia Toretto (Jordana Brewster) and Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) getting a handful of scenes – their days of illegal street racing are well behind them.
16 April 2015
How’s this for high concept horror: there’s a creature out there – supernatural in a way, yet all-too-physical – that comes towards you slowly but inexorably until it reaches you. It can look like anyone, but only you can see it, and nothing can stop it. You can run away, or even drive off – it never moves faster than walking pace – but it never ever stops, so any time you do (say, to fall asleep) it keeps coming closer.
13 April 2015
If you want to get your audience on the edge of their seat, there are few more sure-fire ways to do it than the submarine movie. Unfortunately, while they’re sure-fire, they’re also all pretty much exactly the same once they dive under the surface. As a tale of a rag-tag bunch of salvagers, who charter a rusty Russian sub to retrieve a wreck full of Nazi gold at the bottom of the titular body of water, Black Sea ticks all the boxes…
13 April 2015
It’s the 1950s, and Margaret (Amy Adams) is new in San Francisco. With a young daughter and a husband she left back east, life is a struggle. But she always loved art, and it’s while trying to sell her paintings of big-eyed children on a weekend that she meets fellow artist Walter Keene (Christoph Waltz). He’s charming and a smooth talker, and by the time Margaret notices a few cracks in his story they’re already married and he’s taking the credit for her paintings – for publicity purposes, of course.
10 April 2015
When a small town fisherman takes the local council to court to prevent the compulsory acquisition of his land, it’s the kind of underdog story that we in the west tend to assume will have a happy ending. Not in today’s Russia it doesn’t, and what follows is an utterly compelling look at the way evil – in the form of corruption, blackmail, violence, and a society where the rule of law is nothing but a long-winded pretence – wins out with ruthless efficiency.
7 April 2015
A Mexican Day of the Dead themed film animated so all the cast look like hinged wooden puppets, The Book of Life isn’t quite your average kids movie. Of the three kids films covered this issue (all of which involve quests of some kind of another), this is probably the closest to a straight adventure, though there’s plenty of jokes mixed in.
5 April 2015
This latest SpongeBob SquarePants movie has a lot to live up to: his previous big screen outing in 2004 was a brilliant mix of the silly and the extremely silly, the kind of gleefully demented kids movie that only comes along once in a decade. Well, it’s been a decade, and when this opens with Antonio Banderas moonwalking around booby-traps…
3 April 2015
Pretty much all you need to know about the Shaun the Sheep movie is that it’s from Aardman. Much like their biggest hit Wallace & Grommit, this is a dialogue-free effort based around sight gags, big action sequences, charmingly likeable characters (apart from the bad guys) and a whole lot of fun.
3 April 2015
Anyone remember a Rob Schneider movie titled Big Stan? It’s probably best that you don’t, as it had pretty much the same premise as Get Hard: wussy white guy gets arrested and is so scared of what’s going to happen to him in prison he hires a guy to toughen him up. The difference here is, well, it doesn’t star Rob Schneider and isn’t quite as obsessed with prison rape.
2 April 2015
Disney’s doing Cinderella again? What spin are they putting on the classic tale this time? Turns out the spin here is that there is no spin: director Kenneth Branagh sticks close to the bright colours of the animated classic, the cast rarely test the bonds of their cartoony characters and the special effects are used to bring the story’s magic to life rather than create a world tipped too far over into fantasy.
17 March 2015
The real-life memoir is a tricky thing to pull off in a film. Well, it’s not so tricky if your life has been action packed or you’ve been there for a great turning point in history. If, on the other hand, your story is about growing up in the ’70s with a manic depressive dad, then you might have your work cut out for you. Fortunately, writer / director Maya Forbes has a keen eye for the quirks of her childhood, and so this coming-of-age story has a few edges that are a little sharper than you might have expected.
15 March 2015
There’s no reason why a found footage time travel movie couldn’t work, but Project Almanac doesn’t exactly set out a strong case for why one should. When high school student David (Jonny Weston) is admitted into MIT, his joy is short-lived: turns out he can’t afford the bills.
13 March 2015
You’ve got to have a lot of guts to put the words “second best” right there in the title of your film. But after the first film was a surprise hit, even a second best Exotic Marigold Hotel is bound to draw a lot of interest. This time around while Sonny (Dev Patel) is looking to expand his horizons both at home (he’s engaged) and at work…
12 March 2015
The year is 1983, the place is the Netherlands, and a group of friends (including Sam Worthington, Ryan Kwanten and Jim Sturgess) are drowning in debts from their failing construction company. With all legal fund-raising avenues exhausted and figuring that the only way they can get away with a kidnapping is if the police think it’s been committed by a serious organisation, they turn to crime…
10 March 2015
The year in question is 1981, the place suffering through all this violence is New York, and for Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac) – the owner of up and coming heating oil company Standard Oil – things are about to get hectic. He’s just sealed a deal to purchase the land across from his storage tanks…
9 March 2015
If you’ve ever read any Thomas Pynchon then you know that his plots are both extremely complicated and not the thing you should be focusing on in his novels. So in that sense, Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of his book Inherent Vice is dead on. The tale of Larry “Doc” Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix), hippie private eye and major dope smoker, as he wanders through the L.A. of 1970 trying to solve a series of vaguely overlapping cases…
27 February 2015
When we meet Jim Bennett (Wahlberg), he’s at a dying man’s bedside. A lesser film would suggest that Bennett’s erratic antics throughout the rest of this film are because of his grief, but no: he later gives one long-winded speech about how in this world you either have everything or you have nothing so why not throw it all away? Oh right, because if you owe criminals loads of money, they’ll kill you.
25 February 2015
If you’re heading to Rosewater because it’s written and directed by comedy legend and Daily Show host John Stewart, you’re right: he does write and direct here. But the John Stewart behind the camera for his first feature film is the Stewart that wants to educate the West about the facts behind the news, not the Stewart who actually makes fun of the news…
24 February 2015
So, we nearly had some terrifying flood of terrorist attacks sweeping the globe because of this? Ok, so more than a few experts think the cyber-attack on Sony that lead to them pulling this film from American cinemas may not have come from North Korea after all, but everyone’s a winner anyway.
23 February 2015
Well, it was never going to be as bad as many people expected. The worst thing about the notoriously bad novel was the clunky prose – the one thing that (extensive use of voice-over aside) was never going to be in the film version – and the lurid sex was never going to make it past America’s puritanical ratings board. What was left is pretty much what we get here…
22 February 2015
Often films about the struggle of the oppressed against the oppressor indulge in a fantasy where somehow merely the act of pushing back is enough to make the bad guys see the light. One of the many, many things that Civil Rights drama Selma gets right is the way it shows that often pushing back is merely part of a wider political struggle – that is, causing a disturbance on the street increases political pressure on the people who get things done to do the right thing.
19 February 2015
Bad news, everybody, shape-changing witch Mother Malkin (Julianne Moore) has escaped her medieval mountaintop prison, thanks to a once-in-a-century “blood moon” (don’t ask, it’s never explained) that super-charges her evil powers.
28 January 2015
Coming up with an interesting vampire is no easy task this days, so A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night deserves a round of applause for that achievement alone: set in an Iranian oil town named Bad City where the ditches are clogged with the dead, a teen girl vampire (Sheila Vand) roams the streets on a skateboard, wearing eyeliner and a ’60s style striped top under the chādor that billows out behind her like a cape.
