3 April 2015
Anyone remember a Rob Schneider movie titled Big Stan? It’s probably best that you don’t, as it had pretty much the same premise as Get Hard: wussy white guy gets arrested and is so scared of what’s going to happen to him in prison he hires a guy to toughen him up. The difference here is, well, it doesn’t star Rob Schneider and isn’t quite as obsessed with prison rape.
2 April 2015
Disney’s doing Cinderella again? What spin are they putting on the classic tale this time? Turns out the spin here is that there is no spin: director Kenneth Branagh sticks close to the bright colours of the animated classic, the cast rarely test the bonds of their cartoony characters and the special effects are used to bring the story’s magic to life rather than create a world tipped too far over into fantasy.
17 March 2015
The real-life memoir is a tricky thing to pull off in a film. Well, it’s not so tricky if your life has been action packed or you’ve been there for a great turning point in history. If, on the other hand, your story is about growing up in the ’70s with a manic depressive dad, then you might have your work cut out for you. Fortunately, writer / director Maya Forbes has a keen eye for the quirks of her childhood, and so this coming-of-age story has a few edges that are a little sharper than you might have expected.
15 March 2015
There’s no reason why a found footage time travel movie couldn’t work, but Project Almanac doesn’t exactly set out a strong case for why one should. When high school student David (Jonny Weston) is admitted into MIT, his joy is short-lived: turns out he can’t afford the bills.
13 March 2015
You’ve got to have a lot of guts to put the words “second best” right there in the title of your film. But after the first film was a surprise hit, even a second best Exotic Marigold Hotel is bound to draw a lot of interest. This time around while Sonny (Dev Patel) is looking to expand his horizons both at home (he’s engaged) and at work…
12 March 2015
The year is 1983, the place is the Netherlands, and a group of friends (including Sam Worthington, Ryan Kwanten and Jim Sturgess) are drowning in debts from their failing construction company. With all legal fund-raising avenues exhausted and figuring that the only way they can get away with a kidnapping is if the police think it’s been committed by a serious organisation, they turn to crime…
10 March 2015
The year in question is 1981, the place suffering through all this violence is New York, and for Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac) – the owner of up and coming heating oil company Standard Oil – things are about to get hectic. He’s just sealed a deal to purchase the land across from his storage tanks…
9 March 2015
If you’ve ever read any Thomas Pynchon then you know that his plots are both extremely complicated and not the thing you should be focusing on in his novels. So in that sense, Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of his book Inherent Vice is dead on. The tale of Larry “Doc” Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix), hippie private eye and major dope smoker, as he wanders through the L.A. of 1970 trying to solve a series of vaguely overlapping cases…
27 February 2015
When we meet Jim Bennett (Wahlberg), he’s at a dying man’s bedside. A lesser film would suggest that Bennett’s erratic antics throughout the rest of this film are because of his grief, but no: he later gives one long-winded speech about how in this world you either have everything or you have nothing so why not throw it all away? Oh right, because if you owe criminals loads of money, they’ll kill you.
25 February 2015
If you’re heading to Rosewater because it’s written and directed by comedy legend and Daily Show host John Stewart, you’re right: he does write and direct here. But the John Stewart behind the camera for his first feature film is the Stewart that wants to educate the West about the facts behind the news, not the Stewart who actually makes fun of the news…
24 February 2015
So, we nearly had some terrifying flood of terrorist attacks sweeping the globe because of this? Ok, so more than a few experts think the cyber-attack on Sony that lead to them pulling this film from American cinemas may not have come from North Korea after all, but everyone’s a winner anyway.
23 February 2015
Well, it was never going to be as bad as many people expected. The worst thing about the notoriously bad novel was the clunky prose – the one thing that (extensive use of voice-over aside) was never going to be in the film version – and the lurid sex was never going to make it past America’s puritanical ratings board. What was left is pretty much what we get here…
22 February 2015
Often films about the struggle of the oppressed against the oppressor indulge in a fantasy where somehow merely the act of pushing back is enough to make the bad guys see the light. One of the many, many things that Civil Rights drama Selma gets right is the way it shows that often pushing back is merely part of a wider political struggle – that is, causing a disturbance on the street increases political pressure on the people who get things done to do the right thing.
19 February 2015
Bad news, everybody, shape-changing witch Mother Malkin (Julianne Moore) has escaped her medieval mountaintop prison, thanks to a once-in-a-century “blood moon” (don’t ask, it’s never explained) that super-charges her evil powers.
28 January 2015
Coming up with an interesting vampire is no easy task this days, so A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night deserves a round of applause for that achievement alone: set in an Iranian oil town named Bad City where the ditches are clogged with the dead, a teen girl vampire (Sheila Vand) roams the streets on a skateboard, wearing eyeliner and a ’60s style striped top under the chādor that billows out behind her like a cape.
28 January 2015
Hollywood loves a story of redemption, especially if it involves someone putting themselves through something that’s interesting to look at – say, hiking across a whole lot of beautiful wilderness. The trouble with these stories is that redemption through suffering is a pretty Old Testament idea; these days most of us tend to think that all suffering does is make you suffer.
27 January 2015
Everyone knows that “based on a true story” in no way means that everything in a film is true. But American Sniper, which is based on the memoir of real-life US SEAL sniper Chris Kyle, is in the difficult position of being faithful to a book that, by at least some accounts, is not 100 per cent accurate about Kyle’s war service.
25 January 2015
There are times when it feels like the most interesting things about Birdman are the things it’s not doing. For one, it’s not really an exploration of how superhero movies have distorted and overwhelmed pop culture: sure, the trailers play up the “Birdman” angle a lot, but once you get past the basics – Michael Keaton is Riggan Thomas, a now washed-up actor who once was a mega-star…
24 January 2015
The best that can be said about Dumb and Dumber To is that if it ain’t broke, they sure ain’t trying to fix it. Lloyd (Carrey) has spent the last twenty years in a coma, only don’t worry – it was all a prank played on his equally dim-witted buddy Harry (Daniels). It turns out Harry needs a kidney and his only surviving blood relative is a long-lost daughter. Road trip! Just like the first film.
22 January 2015
The guys behind the Taken series have never quite been able to figure out why the first film worked. You can’t really blame them; Luc Besson’s production company had been churning out fun but formulaic thrillers for years before Taken took off, and while it was easy enough to repeat the superficial elements, the precise circumstances that made the first film such a success were never likely to happen again.
28 December 2014
Adapting the much-loved Paddington Bear stories into a feature film is the kind of idea that’s both inevitable and yet really something to get excited about. Paddington is a fairly low-key character, and they don’t really thrive in a cinema environment. Yet so long as you’re willing to loosen your grip on the Paddington of the books, there’s a lot to enjoy here… even if it does at times feel a lot closer to a generic kids adventure film than the source material.
27 December 2014
The best – well, maybe not “best” – but most satisfying scene in Horrible Bosses 2 is when Jamie Foxx’s character Motherf**ker Jones informs our three heroes that they’re no longer nice guys in a tight corner – they’re criminals.
25 December 2014
The big surprise in Russell Crowe’s otherwise firmly unsurprising directorial debut, is that for a film about Gallipoli this turns out to be a film that really is about Gallipoli. That is, apart from a few opening scenes and a brief flashback or two, this is a film set entirely in Turkey, with a story that’s as much about the situation in Turkey in the wake of the fall of the Ottoman Empire as it is about a grieving Australian looking for the bodies of his dead sons.
22 December 2014
We’re all grown-ups here; we all know how movie trailers work. They’re designed to take a full-length feature film and turn it into a 90 second commercial for how awesome the full length version is. The trouble with that comes when in telling you how awesome the full length version is, they forget to mention major elements of the full length version.
