27 July 2014
In an icy future caused by a bungled cure for global warming, the only survivors of humanity are packed onto one long train constantly circling the frozen planet. The rich who control everything live in luxury in the far distant front; the poor are crammed into cattle cars at the very rear of the train. There in this rolling slum the leader of the underclass, Curtis (Chris Evans), plots an uprising that will take him and his people the length of the train to the engine and control of this rigid class-bound world.
26 July 2014
Melbourne once again becomes the centre of the cinematic universe (in a manner of speaking) with the 63rd annual Melbourne International Film Festival – or, if you want to sound like a cinematic insider, MIFF. With close to 350 films from dozens of countries screening over eighteen days and nights, this year’s festival promises a wide-ranging and robust snapshot of world cinema today.
26 July 2014
Charlie (David Gulpilil) isn’t doing too badly in his remote Northern community. He’s smart enough to put one over both the local police and the white drug dealers who come up to make a quick buck, he can go hunting if he wants a free feed (he’s not a huge fan of the junk food the local supermarket sells), he’s got a humpy to sleep in (he had a house but his family took it over and it was too noisy for his taste) and he’s got friends to talk to if he feels like a chat.
24 July 2014
There are a lot of elements working hard to make Sex Tape one of the worst films of the year, so singling out one to blame is both near-impossible and deeply unfair. A film this bad doesn’t just happen. It takes all manner of factors working together to waste ninety minutes of your life this badly. Sometimes they’re little things, like Jason Segel’s weirdly plastic lineless face in the early flashback scenes or Cameron Diaz saying the utterly unbelievable line in 2014, “am I really going to sell my blog for money?”
23 July 2014
It’s been a decade since Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and here’s all you really need to know: humanity has all but been wiped out by the “Simian Flu” and a tribe of super-intelligent apes have escaped into the woods to the north of San Francisco. The apes, led by Caesar (Andy Serkis), have built a community and settled down, with Caesar starting a family that includes one grown son, Blue Eyes (Nick Thurston) and another child on the way. As for the humans… well, the apes figure they’ve all died out.
19 July 2014
It’s the depths of World War II and in a French alpine village the locals have two enemies to face: the German occupiers trying to stop refugees being smuggled over the mountains into Switzerland and “the Beast”, a giant wild dog killing the farmers’ sheep. But when six-year-old Sebastian (Félix Bossuet) discovers that the dog isn’t the real culprit behind the sheep killings, he must protect his new friend (now named Belle) from hunters, German soldiers, and his own grandfather.
14 July 2014
When a parishioner tells Father James Lavelle (Brendan Gleeson) that in one week he’s going to shoot him dead, Lavelle is surprisingly calm about the whole thing. Then again, while he might be a good priest – that’s why the mystery killer chose him, as to his way of thinking killing a bad one wouldn’t really help make his point about the evil-to-the-core nature of the Catholic Church – but in this small windswept Irish village where adultery, wife-beating, poverty and drug use are rife, nobody has much love for a good priest.
13 July 2014
This is one of those kids movies that seems decent enough while it’s taking place in front of you, but as soon as all the bright colours stop swirling around you realise there’s basically nothing there. The story is straight out of the kids movie sequel handbook as the cast of the first film head off into the Amazon so they can be reunited with their long-lost relatives, only some evil loggers are about to trash the relatives’ home…
12 July 2014
Clint Eastwood takes on the popular jukebox musical looking at the career of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, and largely wrestles it to a draw. The reviews have generally been mixed here, and it’s not hard to see why as director Eastwood decided to make this a film about people who happened to be musicians rather than make a straight-up musical.
11 July 2014
Yes this is stupid, even by the standards of Hollywood blockbusters. It’s not just the on-screen visuals that are driven by the need to make things explode; more than once director Michael Bay seems to use something blowing up as a way to distract audiences from the way one scene doesn’t seem to connect in any real way with the next.
6 July 2014
It’s “Ten Years After the Collapse” and the Australian outback is looking pretty shabby. Actually, it’s looking pretty much like what you’d expect: while for overseas viewers no doubt this particular barren countryside (it was filmed in the northern part of South Australia) looks suitably hostile and desolate, for Australians – the occasionally hanging corpse or army patrol aside – it’s just another day in paradise. Our hero Eric (Guy Pearce) has just pulled into a local bar for a drink when a gang of armed robbers crashes their car outside; having no other options, they steal his car and drive off.
3 July 2014
Our story begins pretty much where you’d expect an Adam Sandler movie to begin: in a toilet stall at Hooters. There Lauren (Drew Barrymore) is on the phone to best friend Jen (Wendi McLendon-Covey) trying to escape from a horrible blind date with Jim (Adam Sandler). While they superficially seem to hate each other, there’s been a glimmer of bonding over her line “It’s as weird as Weird Al starring in Weird Science”, so even though their date fizzles we just know they’ll get back together because that’s the point of this two-hour movie. But because this is a two-hour movie, we first have to spend time with their kids.
1 July 2014
Most jokes just aren’t as funny the second time around. Luckily, in this follow-up to the surprise hit 21 Jump Street, directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (The Lego Movie) have put a new spin on the old TV series. The first film was all about how lame it was to even try to make a movie of the 21 Jump Street TV show; this one is about how lame it is to even try to make a sequel to the 21 Jump Street movie … Maybe the jokes aren’t all that new.
1 July 2014
When we last saw Hiccup (the voice of Jay Baruchel) and his dragon Toothless, they’d brought together dragons and Vikings to live in harmony on the rocky island of Berk. Five years later and they’re all one big happy family – but while Hiccup’s father (and island Chief) Stoick (Gerard Butler) is still running the show and Hiccup’s girlfriend Astrid (America Ferrera) is winning at the island’s new top pastime – dragon racing – Hiccup is off exploring and mapping uncharted islands.
22 June 2014
If you were looking for a template to base a movie about Princess Grace on, The King’s Speech probably wouldn’t leap to mind. And yet that’s what we get here. New to the throne of Monaco, former Hollywood glamour girl turned princess Grace Kelly (Nicole Kidman) is yet to make any real connection with her subjects or her duties – in fact, she’s actively considering going back to Hollywood and acting in Alfred Hitchcock’s latest movie.
16 June 2014
Hazel (Shailene Woodley) is your typical teen: wise beyond her years, doesn’t have to go to school, and walks around with an oxygen tank. She’s a feisty truth-teller, even if pretty much the only thing she does do with her life is go to a cancer support group that she secretly mocks. Hey, lay off: she’s got cancer, don’t you know? Then one day hot guy Gus (Ansel Elgort) turns up at one of her meetings and starts making serious eyes at her.
14 June 2014
It’s not that Seth MacFarlane’s latest film isn’t funny. In this western comedy he continues the rapid-fire approach to joke-telling that’s been a hallmark of his career since he started Family Guy, so that for every joke that misses there’s at least one that hits. And he mixes up the kinds of jokes he’s telling too, so while there’s a fair amount of crude stuff here there’s a bunch of smart jokes about the nature of the West and the social attitudes of the time (people sure were poor, ignorant and racist) in there, too.
12 June 2014
It’s the future – well, kind of the future, as it’s basically the same as today only with robot fighting suits and aliens. First we got the aliens, who are slowly but surely taking over Europe; then we created the battle suits so the people fighting the aliens would last more than five seconds. For sleazy PR expert Major William Cage (Tom Cruise) this is someone else’s problem – his job is to sell war, not fight it – until General Brigham (Brendan Gleeson) orders him to join the first wave of the attack and film it for the folks back home. Cage refuses point-blank.
12 June 2014
Once upon a time there were two kingdoms. One was full of regular selfish, greedy humans and was ruled by a king who’d come to power on a platform of conquering the other kingdom, which was full of magical creatures. There lived Maleficent (Isobelle Molloy), a fairy who was so kind and good she spent her days complimenting astoundingly ugly monsters and using her magic powers to heal broken tree branches.
8 June 2014
It’s been a long time since Jonathan Glazer’s last film (2004’s Birth) and he didn’t make it easy on himself with this one. Scarlett Johansson plays a woman – she’s clearly some kind of alien (the opening scenes are maybe a birth sequence), but exactly what kind of alien she is isn’t clear – who drives around Scotland in a van picking up and then hitting on male hitchhikers. To film this, Glazer had Johansson (wearing a dark-haired wig and speaking in an English accent) drive around Scotland in a van picking up and then hitting on male hitchhikers.
3 June 2014
Director Michael Winterbottom’s 2010 film The Trip was a bit of an oddity. Released both as a six-part television series (in the UK) and an edited-down feature film (everywhere else), it followed comedians Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon (playing slightly altered versions of themselves) around the UK’s Lake District. They visited local restaurants, discussed the lives of poets Coleridge and Wordsworth and did a lot of celebrity impersonations.
31 May 2014
While other genres – crime, science-fiction – struggle and die in Australia, horror just keeps on keeping on. For which we should all be grateful: the pop culture future is firmly genre-based and if we don’t have at least some reputation for doing some of it right we’ll be left as the English-language equivalent of, say, Italy: a place that makes decent films that hardly anyone outside their borders bothers with.
29 May 2014
Superheroes exist in a strange world where anything is possible but the rules that bind them only allow a very narrow range of things to actually be possible. Around the middle of X-Men: Days of Future Past a mutant named Quicksilver (Evan Peters) is introduced whose power is super-speed, the ability to move at rates that leave everyone else standing still.
28 May 2014
The year is 1999, the place is Japan, and the worried face on the screen belongs to Bryan Cranston as a nuclear scientist too worried about the unnatural seismic readings he’s picking up to remember it’s his birthday. Turns out he’s right to be concerned: whatever’s causing the readings also causes a breach at the reactor where he and his scientist wife (Juliette Binoche) work, resulting in disaster, destruction and evacuations all around.
