4 September 2015
Frank Martin (Ed Skrein) is The Transporter, a man who’ll drive anything anywhere: for a price. So being hired as a getaway driver for a group of sex workers looking to get out of the prostitution racket by robbing their enslavers blind (and maybe killing them in the process) is all part of the job. Only this time, they’ve kidnapped his dad (Ray Stevenson) to keep him in line, and Frank doesn’t like that one bit.
3 September 2015
If you remember screenwriter Diablo Cody’s film Young Adult, then you have a good idea what to expect here: a woman who has failed to conform to society’s expectations is drawn back to the world where her failure seems most acute, there to find a way to get the respect of the past she’s never quite been able to shake.
30 August 2015
The time is now, though you wouldn’t know it from looking at Malcolm (Shamelk Moore) and his friends: hardcore devotees of ’90s hip-hop, they walk the walk and talk the talk, which makes them stand out on the mean streets of South Central L.A.
26 August 2015
Philosophy professor Abe Lucas (Joaquin Phoenix) arrives at a small Rhode Island university, only to find that his rakish reputation proceeds him. The reality of this one-time womaniser and firebrand is bleaker: he’s a bloated, washed-up drunk who flirts with suicide and reeks of despair.
24 August 2015
In a year that’ll see at least three Bond-style spy movies (does your spy movie involve an extraordinarily handsome man in a suit? It’s a Bond movie), you really need to do something to stand out from the pack.
21 August 2015
There are a lot of reasons why the latest Fantastic Four movie doesn’t always work, but perhaps the biggest is that the Fantastic Four themselves just are all that strong as characters. That’s not to say they can’t work on the big screen (they just haven’t yet).
20 August 2015
Not every movie exists because it has a story to tell. Movies are made to show off special effects, to hammer home a point, or – in the case of Southpaw, a movie where the only surprise is how surprise-free it is – to win acting awards. Billy “Great” Hope (Jake Gyllenhaal) is the [middleweight champion of the world]. He fought his way up out of a Hell’s Kitchen orphanage to a New York mansion, with his childhood sweetheart (and fellow orphan) Maureen (Rachael McAdams) by his side.
19 August 2015
Twenty years ago a high school play went horribly wrong when an accident resulted in one of the cast being hung live on stage. Seriously? Who sets up a working gallows on stage for a play?
18 August 2015
Broken Hill taxi driver Rex (Michael Caton) tends to keep to himself. His relationship with his neighbour Polly (Ningali Lawford) is kept at arms length and his mates down the pub are just people he has a drink with.
18 August 2015
Over the years the Mission Impossible franchise has honed itself into one of the more sure-fire franchises in 21st century Hollywood. Yes, much of the appeal comes from the chance to see Tom Cruise running around in both a suit and casual wear, but there’s more going on here than that.
17 August 2015
Despite Amy Schumer being the big draw here – which is hardly surprising, as her sketch show Inside Amy Schumer (and more specifically, a handful of sketches from it that have been shared across the internet) have made her a massive star in a very short stretch of time.
4 August 2015
The Insidious movies are about as basic a horror movie as you can get: someone messes around with ghosts, they get possessed, then it’s exorcism time. The only real twist across the three films is that the exorcism stage involves people actually travelling into the spirit realm to rescue the possessed person’s soul, which is why this is a prequel – psychic Elise Rainier (Lin Shaye) died in Chapter 2 and without her there’s nothing to distinguish this series from, say, The Conjuring (made by the same team of James Wan and Leigh Whannell).
3 August 2015
The year is 1947, and it’s been 30 years since Sherlock Holmes (Ian McKellen) last solved a mystery. Now retired and keeping bees in Suffolk with his grumpy housekeeper (Laura Linney) and her idolising son Roger (an excellent Milo Parker), he’s decided to finally tell the story of his final case in his own words (Watson, who wrote and fictionalised all the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, being long gone).
31 July 2015
There’s two ways a brain-swap – or if you prefer, body-swap – movie can go: either the actors being swapped ham their characters up so much it’s obvious when one of them is playing the other, or the actors both just play themselves (well, their characters) and leave the whole “same body, different mind” side of things to take care of itself.
26 July 2015
It was fairly easy to see the appeal of John Green’s first big-screen adaptation, The Fault in Our Stars: a teen romance where everyone had a terminal illness, the combination of jokey banter (to mask their pain) and teen mythology (these guys were certain to live fast, die young, and leave good-looking corpses), it was the kind of hit that makes a career. And with Paper Towns, so it has proved to be.
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…
