11 July 2014
Yes this is stupid, even by the standards of Hollywood blockbusters. It’s not just the on-screen visuals that are driven by the need to make things explode; more than once director Michael Bay seems to use something blowing up as a way to distract audiences from the way one scene doesn’t seem to connect in any real way with the next.
6 July 2014
It’s “Ten Years After the Collapse” and the Australian outback is looking pretty shabby. Actually, it’s looking pretty much like what you’d expect: while for overseas viewers no doubt this particular barren countryside (it was filmed in the northern part of South Australia) looks suitably hostile and desolate, for Australians – the occasionally hanging corpse or army patrol aside – it’s just another day in paradise. Our hero Eric (Guy Pearce) has just pulled into a local bar for a drink when a gang of armed robbers crashes their car outside; having no other options, they steal his car and drive off.
3 July 2014
Our story begins pretty much where you’d expect an Adam Sandler movie to begin: in a toilet stall at Hooters. There Lauren (Drew Barrymore) is on the phone to best friend Jen (Wendi McLendon-Covey) trying to escape from a horrible blind date with Jim (Adam Sandler). While they superficially seem to hate each other, there’s been a glimmer of bonding over her line “It’s as weird as Weird Al starring in Weird Science”, so even though their date fizzles we just know they’ll get back together because that’s the point of this two-hour movie. But because this is a two-hour movie, we first have to spend time with their kids.
1 July 2014
Most jokes just aren’t as funny the second time around. Luckily, in this follow-up to the surprise hit 21 Jump Street, directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (The Lego Movie) have put a new spin on the old TV series. The first film was all about how lame it was to even try to make a movie of the 21 Jump Street TV show; this one is about how lame it is to even try to make a sequel to the 21 Jump Street movie … Maybe the jokes aren’t all that new.
1 July 2014
When we last saw Hiccup (the voice of Jay Baruchel) and his dragon Toothless, they’d brought together dragons and Vikings to live in harmony on the rocky island of Berk. Five years later and they’re all one big happy family – but while Hiccup’s father (and island Chief) Stoick (Gerard Butler) is still running the show and Hiccup’s girlfriend Astrid (America Ferrera) is winning at the island’s new top pastime – dragon racing – Hiccup is off exploring and mapping uncharted islands.
22 June 2014
If you were looking for a template to base a movie about Princess Grace on, The King’s Speech probably wouldn’t leap to mind. And yet that’s what we get here. New to the throne of Monaco, former Hollywood glamour girl turned princess Grace Kelly (Nicole Kidman) is yet to make any real connection with her subjects or her duties – in fact, she’s actively considering going back to Hollywood and acting in Alfred Hitchcock’s latest movie.
16 June 2014
Hazel (Shailene Woodley) is your typical teen: wise beyond her years, doesn’t have to go to school, and walks around with an oxygen tank. She’s a feisty truth-teller, even if pretty much the only thing she does do with her life is go to a cancer support group that she secretly mocks. Hey, lay off: she’s got cancer, don’t you know? Then one day hot guy Gus (Ansel Elgort) turns up at one of her meetings and starts making serious eyes at her.
14 June 2014
It’s not that Seth MacFarlane’s latest film isn’t funny. In this western comedy he continues the rapid-fire approach to joke-telling that’s been a hallmark of his career since he started Family Guy, so that for every joke that misses there’s at least one that hits. And he mixes up the kinds of jokes he’s telling too, so while there’s a fair amount of crude stuff here there’s a bunch of smart jokes about the nature of the West and the social attitudes of the time (people sure were poor, ignorant and racist) in there, too.
12 June 2014
It’s the future – well, kind of the future, as it’s basically the same as today only with robot fighting suits and aliens. First we got the aliens, who are slowly but surely taking over Europe; then we created the battle suits so the people fighting the aliens would last more than five seconds. For sleazy PR expert Major William Cage (Tom Cruise) this is someone else’s problem – his job is to sell war, not fight it – until General Brigham (Brendan Gleeson) orders him to join the first wave of the attack and film it for the folks back home. Cage refuses point-blank.
12 June 2014
Once upon a time there were two kingdoms. One was full of regular selfish, greedy humans and was ruled by a king who’d come to power on a platform of conquering the other kingdom, which was full of magical creatures. There lived Maleficent (Isobelle Molloy), a fairy who was so kind and good she spent her days complimenting astoundingly ugly monsters and using her magic powers to heal broken tree branches.
8 June 2014
It’s been a long time since Jonathan Glazer’s last film (2004’s Birth) and he didn’t make it easy on himself with this one. Scarlett Johansson plays a woman – she’s clearly some kind of alien (the opening scenes are maybe a birth sequence), but exactly what kind of alien she is isn’t clear – who drives around Scotland in a van picking up and then hitting on male hitchhikers. To film this, Glazer had Johansson (wearing a dark-haired wig and speaking in an English accent) drive around Scotland in a van picking up and then hitting on male hitchhikers.
3 June 2014
Director Michael Winterbottom’s 2010 film The Trip was a bit of an oddity. Released both as a six-part television series (in the UK) and an edited-down feature film (everywhere else), it followed comedians Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon (playing slightly altered versions of themselves) around the UK’s Lake District. They visited local restaurants, discussed the lives of poets Coleridge and Wordsworth and did a lot of celebrity impersonations.
31 May 2014
While other genres – crime, science-fiction – struggle and die in Australia, horror just keeps on keeping on. For which we should all be grateful: the pop culture future is firmly genre-based and if we don’t have at least some reputation for doing some of it right we’ll be left as the English-language equivalent of, say, Italy: a place that makes decent films that hardly anyone outside their borders bothers with.
29 May 2014
Superheroes exist in a strange world where anything is possible but the rules that bind them only allow a very narrow range of things to actually be possible. Around the middle of X-Men: Days of Future Past a mutant named Quicksilver (Evan Peters) is introduced whose power is super-speed, the ability to move at rates that leave everyone else standing still.
28 May 2014
The year is 1999, the place is Japan, and the worried face on the screen belongs to Bryan Cranston as a nuclear scientist too worried about the unnatural seismic readings he’s picking up to remember it’s his birthday. Turns out he’s right to be concerned: whatever’s causing the readings also causes a breach at the reactor where he and his scientist wife (Juliette Binoche) work, resulting in disaster, destruction and evacuations all around.
23 May 2014
Billie (Tilda Cobham-Hervey) is 16. Her parents are separated, and while she gets along well with her dad (Beau Travis Williams), it’s her mum (Del Herbert-Jane) that she’s closest to. So when her mum announces that she’s going to transition to male and that with all the stresses and dramas that her journey will cause it’s better if Billie go live with her father for the foreseeable future, it’s a bit of a knock.
22 May 2014
A new Terry Gilliam film is always good news. The Monty Python alumnus’s visual style is layered, very funny, and always a delight to look at, even when the story he’s telling isn’t quite up to the same level. Which has been a little too often of late, though to be fair misfires like The Brothers Grimm and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus weren’t entirely his fault.
20 May 2014
After the success of his low-key but often very funny coming of age tale Submarine, a hard left into absurdist comedy probably wasn’t what many were expecting from Richard Ayoade. Yet that’s what the former IT Crowd star-turned-director has delivered with The Double, based on the novella by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
17 May 2014
In Georgian England, Dido Elizabeth Belle (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) stands alone. The daughter of a British naval officer and an African…
16 May 2014
Jon Favreau (who also directs) is Carl Casper, a chef at a fancy L.A. restaurant. He works hard, he likes his food – fat jokes abound, at least early on – and he likes his son. Maybe Carl’s single, it’s hard to tell – the film literally cares so little about his private life it takes maybe half an hour to tell us that the reason he keeps dropping his son off at his mother’s place isn’t because he works late, but because they’re divorced.
15 May 2014
17-year-old Isabelle (Marine Vacth) wasn’t all that impressed with her first sexual experience. So, as you do, she decides to spend her holidays setting up shop in a local hotel and going to work as a high-class call girl.
13 May 2014
The big complaint – well, one of the many big complaints – about the last Spider-Man film was that in rebooting the franchise they tried to cram way too much in. This sequel doesn’t really have any less story – there are three name-brand spider-villains on the rampage here, which conventional movie logic would have you believe is two too many – but at least this time out everyone involved seems to have the information overload under some semblance of control.
1 May 2014
Cameron Diaz is Carly, the kind of hard-hitting, go-getting lawyer who doesn’t have time to practice any actual law – she’s too busy sleeping with a variety of men whose names she doesn’t even bother remembering because they’re just that disposable. Then she meets Mark (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), and all that changes: now she’s not only remembering his name, she’s only sleeping with him.
1 May 2014
Our story begins in a bleak San Francisco future where computers are doorstops, mobile phones are trash in the street, and everyone sits around looking really, really bored. Through this wanders Max Waters (Paul Bettany), a man who, with no internet to distract him, has plenty of time remember how this all started, five long years ago… Wait: this story about how we have to be terrified that computers are going to take over the world is only set “five years ago” and not in 1991?
