26 March 2016
Cloverfield was the surprise hit of 2008; a found-footage tale of a giant monster’s rampage through New York. As sequels go, 10 Cloverfield Lane is about as far from that as you can get: after leaving her fiancée in New York, Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is driving as far away as she can get when her car is hit and she wakes up chained to a wall in the basement of Howard (John Goodman).
25 March 2016
This isn’t exactly “what if James Bond had a soccer hooligan brother” (that’d be Kingsman), but when Nobby (Sasha Baron Cohen), Grimsby resident and massive soccer fan, finally tracks down his long-lost brother Sebastian (Mark Strong) only to find he’s a posh, gadget-heavy secret agent, you’d be forgiven for expecting a bunch of spy antics with some broad comedy mixed in. And you’d be right… except that when Sasha Baron Cohen is involved, “broad” is an understatement.
23 March 2016
Living in exile from their community in 1630’s New England, a deeply religious family tend their struggling farm on the edge of a dark wood.
19 March 2016
In a world where all kinds of animals try to live in harmony, rabbit Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) is going against the grain. She’s joined the police force – not usually the domain of “cute” (a racist insult in this world) little bunnies in a world where lions and lambs are meant to exist side by side – and even being a traffic cop doesn’t come free of prejudice.
13 March 2016
At first glance this film adaptation of Alan Bennett’s play and memoir sounds like the worst kind of treacle: an introverted writer (Alex Jennings, playing Bennett) finds his life turned upside down when a fiery, obnoxious and somewhat odorous old lady (Maggie Smith) parks the van she lives in outside his London home.
12 March 2016
It’s been a while since the Coen Brothers have made a straight-out comedy (perhaps because their reputation there is a little hit-and-miss); Hail, Caesar does a pretty good job of highlighting both their strengths and weaknesses when it comes to getting laughs.
11 March 2016
We’ve seen a few crime films of late that have suggested crime is turning America into a warzone, but this cranks it up a notch: here Atlanta is a city torn between murderous Latino gangs who leave severed heads on car bonnets just for fun, and the all-Jewish Russian Mob who have a stranglehold on the “tied up people in car boots” market.
6 March 2016
Michael Bay doing a based-on-a-true-story war movie should be a no-brainer in more ways than one, and it’s fair to say that this features both a lot of impressive action sequences and not a great deal of insight into the causes of those action sequences.
27 February 2016
There’s a lot to like about Zoolander 2. For one thing, rarely has there been a feature-length comedy so devoted to the comedy potential of people pulling silly faces, which might sound like damning with faint praise but face facts: face pulling can be really funny if done right.
26 February 2016
The year is 33AD, and Roman tribune Clavius (Joseph Fiennes) has just returned from supressing Judean rebels when Pontius Pilate (Peter Firth) calls him into his office.
23 February 2016
On the one hand, Deadpool is about as traditional a superhero movie as you can get: it’s the origin story of remorseless killing machine Deadpool, AKA Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds), just your regular average gun-for-hire who, after being diagnosed with cancer, underwent an experimental “treatment” (more like torture) at the hands of Ajax (Ed Skrein) that unleashed his mutant powers (he basically can’t be killed) but turned him into a hideous freak.
20 February 2016
The first Ride Along was a surprisingly good (read; it didn’t stink) buddy cop film powered by Kevin Hart’s motor-mouth comedy skills and Ice Cube’s ability to project massive levels of distain.
15 February 2016
Five-year-old Jack (Jacob Tremblay) lives with his mother (Brie Larson) in a room that, we gradually discover, they never leave. Jack doesn’t mind; never having known any different (let alone a haircut) this one windowless room is his entire world.
8 February 2016
Director Danny Boyle and scriptwriter Aaron Sorkin’s take on the Steve Jobs legend – with this the second film on Jobs in five years, “legend” seems right – avoids the traditional format of the earlier Ashton Kutcher-starring Jobs.
7 February 2016
By Hollywood’s explosion-heavy standards, writer/director Todd McCarthy’s Spotlight – which follows the real-life 2001 investigation by the Boston Globe into the Catholic Church’s protection of paedophile priests – seems as close to drama-free as it gets.
4 February 2016
Jason Kelly (Zac Efron) is a week away from getting married when his recently widowed grandfather (Robert DeNiro) asks him to drive him down to Florida to play golf. Surprise! Grandpa is really looking to party hard and Jason – the most uptight man alive – is along for the ride.
29 January 2016
When New York teen Zach (Dylan Minnette) and his newly-widowed mum (Amy Ryan) relocate to the suburbs of Delaware, they find themselves next door to a big old spooky house where instant love interest Hannah (Odeya Rush) is kept under lock and key by her creepy dad (Jack Black).
27 January 2016
Dystopian teen fiction has reached a stage where the only thing that separates one series from another is the surface details.
25 January 2016
Who would have thought the most scathing film about the Global Financial Crisis would come from a director best known for the Anchorman films? Based on Michael Lewis’ book The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, this focuses on the handful of money men who, leading up to the GFC, saw the crash coming.
21 January 2016
Quentin Tarantino’s latest film is full of the things he does best: sudden violence, self-satisfied dialogue, powerhouse performances and a lot of the n-word.
16 January 2016
The secret behind making a good trashy movie is that it has to be both trashy and good. While the first Point Break managed to be both, this remake seems to have largely taken its cues from various extreme sport marketing videos where the focus is on how awesome the stunts are rather than having any kind of fun with them.
14 January 2016
Tina Fey and Amy Poehler have great chemistry together – it’s pretty much the saving grace of their first film Baby Mama.
11 January 2016
The alarm bells started ringing when Daddy’s Home (which re-teams The Other Guys stars Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg) was rated PG.
9 January 2016
For the psychedelic lovers out there, we’ve found your next big thing with Sydney psych-rock trio the Walking Who.
