Love & Mercy
27 June 2015
One of the big problems biopics face is how to condense an entire life down into a two hour film….
27 June 2015
One of the big problems biopics face is how to condense an entire life down into a two hour film….
26 June 2015
Riley (Kaitlyn Dias) is an average 11-year-old girl, ruled by her emotions like everyone else: specifically Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness…
25 June 2015
This is the kind of reboot – it seems we’re now pretending the second and third films in the Jurassic…
5 June 2015
In an un-named city, Gregori (Vincent Cassel) roams the streets salvaging debris and trash – the human kind too. We…
4 June 2015
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: an older lady (played by a serious British actor) teams up with…
2 June 2015
Once upon a time, the future was a bright and shiny place to look forward to. So what went wrong?…
31 May 2015
Bradley Fine (Jude Law) is the CIA’s top agent, thanks in large part to his adoring and super-competent desk-bound handler…
28 May 2015
The important thing to keep in mind with Mad Max: Fury Road is that while it does what it does…
5 May 2015
It’s Nicholas Sparks movie time again, and you know what that means: young lovers from two different worlds trying to make it work while some old guy – or just a bunch of his letters – lurk around in the background and hand out useful advice. Luke Collins is a professional bull rider who’s struggling to make a comeback after Rango the killer bull kicked his ass, while Sophia Danko is a fine arts student set to take on an internship at a snooty New York gallery.
3 May 2015
There’s a certain kind of action movie that likes to think it’s about more than just shooting bad guys and blowing up stuff. You can tell when you’re watching one of these films, because they’re almost always set in Africa, home of loads of gun-toting henchman that movie stars can kill while feeling bad that colonialism has made large swathes of the continent the perfect place to stage an action movie – and so it turns out to be in The Gunman.
1 May 2015
The big problem with writing stories about World War One is that there’s really only one story you can tell about World War One, and that’s that War is pointless. World War Two is the one with all the exciting, heroic stuff, Vietnam is the crazy war, everything more recent has to be treated very carefully to show respect to those who fought and everything more ancient is so far in the past you can do whatever you like.
30 April 2015
Comic books – at least, the ones from the two major commercial publishers – don’t work like most other media. They’re serialised entertainment, even more so than most television, where the actual unit you pay to read (the comic itself) isn’t the same length as the stories being told. And not just in a “this story runs for six issues” way either…
25 April 2015
Since the death of his loving father in a car crash, Nathan (Asa Butterfield) has devoted his life to being good enough at maths to get a spot on the British squad for the International Mathematics Olympiad. For his acerbic, MS-afflicted teacher (Rafe Spall), Nathan’s single-minded obsession (he’s diagnosed early on as being on the autistic spectrum) is something that brings them together…
24 April 2015
High school senior Bianca (Mae Whitman) has it all – well, she has a couple of really great best friends who always have her back, and isn’t that what really counts. But then she discovers that to everyone else she’s the DUFF – designated ugly fat friend – of the group: the less attractive one everyone else uses as a way to get close to the people they really want to meet.
20 April 2015
Any film that talks about the generation gap – or even considers pitting young people against old – is treading on some pretty dodgy territory. People are pretty much people whatever their age: once you start making sweeping generalisations, you stop saying things that make much sense. Fortunately writer/director Noah Baumbach (Frances Ha, Greenberg) is too smart to fall into any of those obvious traps…
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.
