8 September 2014
Ivan Locke (Tom Hardy) walks off a building site, gets into his car and starts driving. And that’s pretty much it for this film: the following eighty-something minutes are just him behind the wheel juggling phone call after phone call as his life pretty much falls apart. For one thing, his family aren’t exactly happy that he’s not coming home; for another, his bosses are even less impressed that he’s driving off on the eve of one of the biggest concrete pours in European building history – a pour he’s meant to be supervising.
6 September 2014
After getting himself shot (and surviving) during a drug bust, detective Malcolm Toohey (Joel Edgerton, who also wrote the script) is a hero. Which is lucky, because after a night spent in boozy celebration he drives home, sideswipes a kid on a bike, and leaves him in a coma. It’s the kind of thing that costs cops – even hero ones – their badge; fortunately for him, Detective Carl Summer (Tom Wilkinson) is handy and more than willing to put together a cover-up that will keep him out of trouble.
5 September 2014
The story of Ip Man – legendary Kung Fu master of China and teacher of Bruce Lee – has been a popular one in martial arts films for almost as long as there has been martial arts films. Director Kar Wai Wong (Chungking Express, 2046) isn’t exactly known for action filmmaking, so when it was announced he’d be tackling the story of Ip Man, at least some heads were scratched: would he be making a traditional kung fu film, or would he somehow find a way to bring the Kung Fu master’s life into synch with his own storytelling obsessions?
5 September 2014
So a mockumentary about a bunch of vampires living in a sharehouse in New Zealand probably shouldn’t work. In large part why this does is because it fully commits to its premise: Viago (Taika Waititi, who co-wrote and directs) is our guide into New Zealand’s underworld, a foppish vampire from the early 19th Century who’s basically a kind of dorky nice guy … apart from all the blood drinking.
28 August 2014
It’s a rare film where even just mentioning the name of the short story it’s based on is a massive spoiler. But while Predestination is based on a classic science fiction short story, it’s also based on a short story that is (famously) nothing but a series of twists – and while this film version has more to offer than just that, those twists remain such a central part of the story that … let’s just say the less you know going in the better.
25 August 2014
These days Woody Allen’s strikerate is down to around one in three. The trouble is picking which one is going to be the one worth checking out, as on the surface pretty much all Allen’s recent films sound equally likely to be a hit. Midnight in Paris, about a writer who travels back in time to the Paris of the 1920s, turned out to be a charming romp; Allen’s next film, To Rome with Love, was about various relationships in Rome, and was… not so great.
23 August 2014
After three television series and a movie, chances are you already have a pretty good idea whether you’re on board with The Inbetweeners’ take on teenage boys. So to break the shocking news up front: this is pretty much more of the same. Which actually is shocking news, because the last film made a bit of an effort to push the four leads – Will McKenzie (Simon Bird), Jay Cartwright (James Buckley), Simon Cooper (Joe Thomas) and Neil Sutherland (Blake Harrison) – at least some of the way towards adulthood.
22 August 2014
The last two Expendables were about a bunch of over-the-hill mercenaries taking down a bad guy by blowing a lot of stuff up. So let’s be honest here: if you’ve seen the first two, you’ve pretty much seen this one. Some things are slightly different – much less Bruce Willis, much more Wesley Snipes and Harrison Ford – but it’s really more of the same slurred dialogue, bulging muscles, Eastern European locations and planes flying around … So many shots of people on planes.
15 August 2014
It’s the end of the world and Perth is the last place to go. Most sensible people seem to have already killed themselves, leaving behind only the crazy, the murderous, the occasional small child, and James (Nathan Phillips). While he sure seems to have a connection with the woman he’s currently having a lot of sex with, he just can’t stay – he’s got a party to go to.
13 August 2014
Casting Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as Hercules? Best casting move of the year. Shame the film he’s in doesn’t quite live up to his awesomeness. The hook here is pretty much the opposite of all the recent run of sword and sandal movies: while our story begins with the traditional bunch of myths and legends around Hercules, son of Zeus, the reality is a bit more prosaic…
10 August 2014
Director Anton Corbijn didn’t set himself an easy task in adapting John le Carré’s 2008 novel. Le Carré’s work is notorious both for his dour look at the world of spying and his intricate, complex plots. So here Corbijn and scriptwriter Andrew Bovell have created a film in which every detail is vital. There are no dead patches here, no moments where you can safely duck out for a minute to check your phone.
9 August 2014
Philosophy and gun fights don’t really seem like a natural combination, but they’re one of the more successful team-ups in movie history. There’s been loads of existentialist hitmen and crooks all the way up to the lead in Drive; The Matrix was more than happy to ponder the nature of reality in between somersaulting shootouts; and now in Lucy Scarlett Johansson unravels the mysteries of evolution and time itself when she’s not fending off a Tawianese drug cartel.
8 August 2014
Oren (Michael Douglas) is an acid-tongued real estate agent living in a tiny lakeside apartment packed with his old furniture while he tries every trick in the book to sell the mansion he’d shared with his now deceased wife. Leah (Diane Keaton) is a ditzy nightclub singer living in the apartment next door who’s still struggling to get over her husband’s death.
8 August 2014
Once you figure out the formula behind Marvel’s current run of movies, it’s awfully hard to go back to enjoying them. In that sense then, Guardians of the Galaxy is just about the smartest move they could have made at this stage of the franchise.
5 August 2014
Thomas (Mathieu Amalric) is a playwright directing his first play and after a long day of auditions he’s about to head home when Vanda (Emmanuelle Seigner) comes in out of the rain. She’s here to audition and she’s not going to be put off by his efforts to get her out the door and gradually she wears him down enough for them to at least start talking about his play, an adaptation of the classic story ‘Venus in Fur’ about a man’s obsession with a woman who can dominate and control him.
27 July 2014
In an icy future caused by a bungled cure for global warming, the only survivors of humanity are packed onto one long train constantly circling the frozen planet. The rich who control everything live in luxury in the far distant front; the poor are crammed into cattle cars at the very rear of the train. There in this rolling slum the leader of the underclass, Curtis (Chris Evans), plots an uprising that will take him and his people the length of the train to the engine and control of this rigid class-bound world.
26 July 2014
Melbourne once again becomes the centre of the cinematic universe (in a manner of speaking) with the 63rd annual Melbourne International Film Festival – or, if you want to sound like a cinematic insider, MIFF. With close to 350 films from dozens of countries screening over eighteen days and nights, this year’s festival promises a wide-ranging and robust snapshot of world cinema today.
26 July 2014
Charlie (David Gulpilil) isn’t doing too badly in his remote Northern community. He’s smart enough to put one over both the local police and the white drug dealers who come up to make a quick buck, he can go hunting if he wants a free feed (he’s not a huge fan of the junk food the local supermarket sells), he’s got a humpy to sleep in (he had a house but his family took it over and it was too noisy for his taste) and he’s got friends to talk to if he feels like a chat.
24 July 2014
There are a lot of elements working hard to make Sex Tape one of the worst films of the year, so singling out one to blame is both near-impossible and deeply unfair. A film this bad doesn’t just happen. It takes all manner of factors working together to waste ninety minutes of your life this badly. Sometimes they’re little things, like Jason Segel’s weirdly plastic lineless face in the early flashback scenes or Cameron Diaz saying the utterly unbelievable line in 2014, “am I really going to sell my blog for money?”
23 July 2014
It’s been a decade since Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and here’s all you really need to know: humanity has all but been wiped out by the “Simian Flu” and a tribe of super-intelligent apes have escaped into the woods to the north of San Francisco. The apes, led by Caesar (Andy Serkis), have built a community and settled down, with Caesar starting a family that includes one grown son, Blue Eyes (Nick Thurston) and another child on the way. As for the humans… well, the apes figure they’ve all died out.
19 July 2014
It’s the depths of World War II and in a French alpine village the locals have two enemies to face: the German occupiers trying to stop refugees being smuggled over the mountains into Switzerland and “the Beast”, a giant wild dog killing the farmers’ sheep. But when six-year-old Sebastian (Félix Bossuet) discovers that the dog isn’t the real culprit behind the sheep killings, he must protect his new friend (now named Belle) from hunters, German soldiers, and his own grandfather.
14 July 2014
When a parishioner tells Father James Lavelle (Brendan Gleeson) that in one week he’s going to shoot him dead, Lavelle is surprisingly calm about the whole thing. Then again, while he might be a good priest – that’s why the mystery killer chose him, as to his way of thinking killing a bad one wouldn’t really help make his point about the evil-to-the-core nature of the Catholic Church – but in this small windswept Irish village where adultery, wife-beating, poverty and drug use are rife, nobody has much love for a good priest.
13 July 2014
This is one of those kids movies that seems decent enough while it’s taking place in front of you, but as soon as all the bright colours stop swirling around you realise there’s basically nothing there. The story is straight out of the kids movie sequel handbook as the cast of the first film head off into the Amazon so they can be reunited with their long-lost relatives, only some evil loggers are about to trash the relatives’ home…
12 July 2014
Clint Eastwood takes on the popular jukebox musical looking at the career of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, and largely wrestles it to a draw. The reviews have generally been mixed here, and it’s not hard to see why as director Eastwood decided to make this a film about people who happened to be musicians rather than make a straight-up musical.
