23 May 2014
Billie (Tilda Cobham-Hervey) is 16. Her parents are separated, and while she gets along well with her dad (Beau Travis Williams), it’s her mum (Del Herbert-Jane) that she’s closest to. So when her mum announces that she’s going to transition to male and that with all the stresses and dramas that her journey will cause it’s better if Billie go live with her father for the foreseeable future, it’s a bit of a knock.
22 May 2014
A new Terry Gilliam film is always good news. The Monty Python alumnus’s visual style is layered, very funny, and always a delight to look at, even when the story he’s telling isn’t quite up to the same level. Which has been a little too often of late, though to be fair misfires like The Brothers Grimm and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus weren’t entirely his fault.
20 May 2014
After the success of his low-key but often very funny coming of age tale Submarine, a hard left into absurdist comedy probably wasn’t what many were expecting from Richard Ayoade. Yet that’s what the former IT Crowd star-turned-director has delivered with The Double, based on the novella by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
17 May 2014
In Georgian England, Dido Elizabeth Belle (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) stands alone. The daughter of a British naval officer and an African…
16 May 2014
Jon Favreau (who also directs) is Carl Casper, a chef at a fancy L.A. restaurant. He works hard, he likes his food – fat jokes abound, at least early on – and he likes his son. Maybe Carl’s single, it’s hard to tell – the film literally cares so little about his private life it takes maybe half an hour to tell us that the reason he keeps dropping his son off at his mother’s place isn’t because he works late, but because they’re divorced.
15 May 2014
17-year-old Isabelle (Marine Vacth) wasn’t all that impressed with her first sexual experience. So, as you do, she decides to spend her holidays setting up shop in a local hotel and going to work as a high-class call girl.
13 May 2014
The big complaint – well, one of the many big complaints – about the last Spider-Man film was that in rebooting the franchise they tried to cram way too much in. This sequel doesn’t really have any less story – there are three name-brand spider-villains on the rampage here, which conventional movie logic would have you believe is two too many – but at least this time out everyone involved seems to have the information overload under some semblance of control.
1 May 2014
Cameron Diaz is Carly, the kind of hard-hitting, go-getting lawyer who doesn’t have time to practice any actual law – she’s too busy sleeping with a variety of men whose names she doesn’t even bother remembering because they’re just that disposable. Then she meets Mark (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), and all that changes: now she’s not only remembering his name, she’s only sleeping with him.
1 May 2014
Our story begins in a bleak San Francisco future where computers are doorstops, mobile phones are trash in the street, and everyone sits around looking really, really bored. Through this wanders Max Waters (Paul Bettany), a man who, with no internet to distract him, has plenty of time remember how this all started, five long years ago… Wait: this story about how we have to be terrified that computers are going to take over the world is only set “five years ago” and not in 1991?
1 May 2014
Mac (Seth Rogen) and Kelly (Rose Byrne) are a young couple trying to convince themselves that being married and having a baby doesn’t mean they have to give up on having fun, even if all their attempts at having fun fizzle out. So when a fraternity moves in next door – seriously, aren’t there laws against a bunch of teenage guys buying a house in a suburban street to turn it into a party dungeon?
17 April 2014
Jim Jarmusch’s latest film takes the vampire genre and boils it down to an element not seen so often these days: vampires as the ultimate hipsters, cruising around the world causally dropping famous names while sneakily scoring their blood from blood banks rather than the necks of passing strangers.
17 April 2014
The funniest thing about In a World… is that it’s actually set in a parallel world – one where having voice-over artists narrate movie trailers is still a big thing. Well, that’s not really the funniest thing: with roughly half the cast of hilarious and bizarre sitcom Children’s Hospital in this debut feature from writer/director/star Lake Bell (also from Children’s Hospital), it’s hardly surprising that there are a lot of funny lines in here.
17 April 2014
You know the drill by now: it’s the future, and after some great cataclysm that wiped out everything that went before – well, not the buildings and stuff, because we’re still clearly in Chicago, even if things are a bit crumbly and there are wind turbines on all the tall buildings – society has undergone some serious changes.
17 April 2014
The year is 1932. Actually, no it’s not. It’s the present day, where we see a young girl clutching a book visiting a key-strewn memorial in an Eastern European graveyard. Then we jump back to 1985, where an author (Tom Wilkinson) gives a televised lecture interrupted by a small child. He’s talking about how stories present themselves to an author; his example takes place in 1968, when he (now played by Jude Law) was staying in the now-drab Grand Hotel Budapest, located in the (fictional) now-communist Eastern European country of Zubrowka.
3 April 2014
First things first: the Australian edition of Danish director Lars Von Trier’s highly anticipated sex-fest isn’t actually porn. Australia is currently getting the conjoined four hour version (with a ten minute interval) rather than the original two separate films (over five hours in total).
3 April 2014
Bruce Garrett (Nick Frost) used to be a shining light in the world of Salsa dancing. Under the tutelage of grumpy sod Ron Parfait (Ian McShane) and with his younger sister Sam (Olivia Colman) as his partner, his teenage self filled his shelves with trophies. And then, on the night of the national finals, he was cornered in a parking garage by a gang of bullies. They made him eat the sequins off his shirt, he skipped the finals, called up Ron to say “Salsa’s for pussies”, and turned his back on dance forever.
3 April 2014
The Raid was a lean, brutal, propulsive action thriller laced with jaw-dropping fights and a structure that kept the endless violence fresh (basically, they started with guns, then knives, then fists, then whatever was lying around). In the sequel, director Gareth Evans has decided to expand both the fights and the story – only it seems bigger isn’t always better.
3 April 2014
Forget all the “is it faithful to The Bible or not” chatter. The real thing to be thinking about going in to see director Darren Aronofsky’s epic is “how are they going to turn the Bible story into a two-hour twenty-minute movie?” And how, you might ask, they’re going to spice things up with all manner of crazy new additions – yes, this is a movie where fallen angels have turned into rock monsters. The real answer involves less magical fantasy and more shots of a brooding Russell Crowe.
3 April 2014
Anyone who’s been following the rise of the Lego gaming franchise knows that the little plastic blocks aren’t just for sticking together any more. So what’s surprising about their first big screen outing is the way it manages to not only capture the silly fun of the games, but build on it to create a movie that’s one of the first really impressive animated features in a long, long time (sorry Mr Peabody & Sherman).
3 April 2014
The thing about Marvel movies – which becomes a lot easier to spot once you realise they’re now Disney movies – is that they’re basically all the same. The stories are somewhat different, the characters have different superpowers and are played by different actors, but the core values of the films are pretty much identical: one hero, with a couple of sidekicks of lesser power, becomes entangled in a somewhat mysterious plot run by a sinister bad guy who’s kept a secret from the hero for much of the film (otherwise the hero would just go beat the bad guy up), with the destruction-heavy action sequences balanced out by a lot of mildly funny quips from the good guys.
20 March 2014
Remember 300? Lot of shirtless guys and CGI blood splashing around … gave the world Gerard Butler: movie star? Well, this begins seconds after that film ends – King Leonidas and his men are all dead; the evil Persian God-King Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) triumphant – then flashes back 10 years earlier when Greek leader Themistocles (Sullivan Stapleton) thwarted the first Persian invasion and killed the (then) Persian king.
20 March 2014
It’s World War 2 in occupied Paris, which means the Nazis run everything. Bad news: the Nazis like art and they’re grabbing all the good stuff for themselves and running off with it. Parisian art scholar Claire Simone (Cate Blanchett) isn’t happy about this. Neither is US art historian Frank Stokes (George Clooney, who also directs), who delivers a lecture to FDR about the threat posed to the art of Europe by Hitler’s proposed giant museum.
20 March 2014
Brooding dude Tobey Marshall (Aaron Paul) is struggling to keep his now dead dad’s garage afloat the only way he knows how. Fixing cars? Nah: illegal street racing, complete with buddy Benny (Scott “Kid Cudi” Mescudi) flying overhead making sure the roads are clear. Then former local turned big-time racer who no one respects (because he’s secretly evil and not as good as Tobey and also stole Tobey’s girl) Dino Brewster (Dominic Cooper) shows up.
6 March 2014
Wolf Creek 2 opens with a pre-credits bit of fun in which murderous nutbag Mick Taylor (John Jarratt) is pulled over and harassed by a pair of thug-like cops. Of course, they get their comeuppance and then some. It puts the audience on notice: Mick might be a rapist and serial killer, but this time around he’s the hero of the tale. And why shouldn’t he be? John Jarratt is extremely charismatic as Mick, and he gets all the good lines, throwing out the Aussie slang and swearwords at every possible opportunity. In his own likable way he’s someone we can cheer for – apart from the murdering, of course.
