1 May 2014
Mac (Seth Rogen) and Kelly (Rose Byrne) are a young couple trying to convince themselves that being married and having a baby doesn’t mean they have to give up on having fun, even if all their attempts at having fun fizzle out. So when a fraternity moves in next door – seriously, aren’t there laws against a bunch of teenage guys buying a house in a suburban street to turn it into a party dungeon?
17 April 2014
Jim Jarmusch’s latest film takes the vampire genre and boils it down to an element not seen so often these days: vampires as the ultimate hipsters, cruising around the world causally dropping famous names while sneakily scoring their blood from blood banks rather than the necks of passing strangers.
17 April 2014
The funniest thing about In a World… is that it’s actually set in a parallel world – one where having voice-over artists narrate movie trailers is still a big thing. Well, that’s not really the funniest thing: with roughly half the cast of hilarious and bizarre sitcom Children’s Hospital in this debut feature from writer/director/star Lake Bell (also from Children’s Hospital), it’s hardly surprising that there are a lot of funny lines in here.
17 April 2014
You know the drill by now: it’s the future, and after some great cataclysm that wiped out everything that went before – well, not the buildings and stuff, because we’re still clearly in Chicago, even if things are a bit crumbly and there are wind turbines on all the tall buildings – society has undergone some serious changes.
17 April 2014
The year is 1932. Actually, no it’s not. It’s the present day, where we see a young girl clutching a book visiting a key-strewn memorial in an Eastern European graveyard. Then we jump back to 1985, where an author (Tom Wilkinson) gives a televised lecture interrupted by a small child. He’s talking about how stories present themselves to an author; his example takes place in 1968, when he (now played by Jude Law) was staying in the now-drab Grand Hotel Budapest, located in the (fictional) now-communist Eastern European country of Zubrowka.
3 April 2014
First things first: the Australian edition of Danish director Lars Von Trier’s highly anticipated sex-fest isn’t actually porn. Australia is currently getting the conjoined four hour version (with a ten minute interval) rather than the original two separate films (over five hours in total).
3 April 2014
Bruce Garrett (Nick Frost) used to be a shining light in the world of Salsa dancing. Under the tutelage of grumpy sod Ron Parfait (Ian McShane) and with his younger sister Sam (Olivia Colman) as his partner, his teenage self filled his shelves with trophies. And then, on the night of the national finals, he was cornered in a parking garage by a gang of bullies. They made him eat the sequins off his shirt, he skipped the finals, called up Ron to say “Salsa’s for pussies”, and turned his back on dance forever.
3 April 2014
The Raid was a lean, brutal, propulsive action thriller laced with jaw-dropping fights and a structure that kept the endless violence fresh (basically, they started with guns, then knives, then fists, then whatever was lying around). In the sequel, director Gareth Evans has decided to expand both the fights and the story – only it seems bigger isn’t always better.
3 April 2014
Forget all the “is it faithful to The Bible or not” chatter. The real thing to be thinking about going in to see director Darren Aronofsky’s epic is “how are they going to turn the Bible story into a two-hour twenty-minute movie?” And how, you might ask, they’re going to spice things up with all manner of crazy new additions – yes, this is a movie where fallen angels have turned into rock monsters. The real answer involves less magical fantasy and more shots of a brooding Russell Crowe.
3 April 2014
Anyone who’s been following the rise of the Lego gaming franchise knows that the little plastic blocks aren’t just for sticking together any more. So what’s surprising about their first big screen outing is the way it manages to not only capture the silly fun of the games, but build on it to create a movie that’s one of the first really impressive animated features in a long, long time (sorry Mr Peabody & Sherman).
3 April 2014
The thing about Marvel movies – which becomes a lot easier to spot once you realise they’re now Disney movies – is that they’re basically all the same. The stories are somewhat different, the characters have different superpowers and are played by different actors, but the core values of the films are pretty much identical: one hero, with a couple of sidekicks of lesser power, becomes entangled in a somewhat mysterious plot run by a sinister bad guy who’s kept a secret from the hero for much of the film (otherwise the hero would just go beat the bad guy up), with the destruction-heavy action sequences balanced out by a lot of mildly funny quips from the good guys.
20 March 2014
Remember 300? Lot of shirtless guys and CGI blood splashing around … gave the world Gerard Butler: movie star? Well, this begins seconds after that film ends – King Leonidas and his men are all dead; the evil Persian God-King Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) triumphant – then flashes back 10 years earlier when Greek leader Themistocles (Sullivan Stapleton) thwarted the first Persian invasion and killed the (then) Persian king.
20 March 2014
It’s World War 2 in occupied Paris, which means the Nazis run everything. Bad news: the Nazis like art and they’re grabbing all the good stuff for themselves and running off with it. Parisian art scholar Claire Simone (Cate Blanchett) isn’t happy about this. Neither is US art historian Frank Stokes (George Clooney, who also directs), who delivers a lecture to FDR about the threat posed to the art of Europe by Hitler’s proposed giant museum.
20 March 2014
Brooding dude Tobey Marshall (Aaron Paul) is struggling to keep his now dead dad’s garage afloat the only way he knows how. Fixing cars? Nah: illegal street racing, complete with buddy Benny (Scott “Kid Cudi” Mescudi) flying overhead making sure the roads are clear. Then former local turned big-time racer who no one respects (because he’s secretly evil and not as good as Tobey and also stole Tobey’s girl) Dino Brewster (Dominic Cooper) shows up.
6 March 2014
Wolf Creek 2 opens with a pre-credits bit of fun in which murderous nutbag Mick Taylor (John Jarratt) is pulled over and harassed by a pair of thug-like cops. Of course, they get their comeuppance and then some. It puts the audience on notice: Mick might be a rapist and serial killer, but this time around he’s the hero of the tale. And why shouldn’t he be? John Jarratt is extremely charismatic as Mick, and he gets all the good lines, throwing out the Aussie slang and swearwords at every possible opportunity. In his own likable way he’s someone we can cheer for – apart from the murdering, of course.
6 March 2014
True story time: in 1977, 26-year-old Robyn Davidson (Mia Wasikowska) set out to cross Australia from Alice Springs to the West Australian Coast by camel. It wasn’t exactly a spur-of-the-moment decision: she’d been training herself for a year to handle camels and then had to figure out a way to raise the money to pay for supplies. That proved to be harder than she’d hoped. Eventually, and reluctantly, she had to take a sponsorship from National Geographic magazine.
6 March 2014
Liam Neeson works as an action star because he’s always the best thing in his action movies. Sometimes he gets lucky and the story holds up or the action is well-handled, but time and time again he’s managed to lift an otherwise average project to a higher level with his gruff-bordering-on-comedic charm and totally commitment to whatever unlikely story he happens to be found in. Which is good news, because it means that when he does get a decent project – such as this one – the end result is a film that really is worth your time.
20 February 2014
American films about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have usually failed to connect with audiences. Director Peter Berg’s adaptation of US Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell’s memoir Lone Survivor is an exception, raking in big money at the US box office: it seems the secret to mainstream success is no-holds-barred patriotism. The true story of a failed four-man mission in 2005 to assassinate a Taliban leader in Afghanistan, this film is smarter than it looks. Which, to be honest, isn’t all that hard thanks to a lot of extremely overt US patriotism. (It opens with a real-life Navy SEAL training montage and ends with a terrible soft-rock version of Bowie’s ‘Heroes’.)
20 February 2014
First, the bad news: this reworking on the 1981 classic does not take the same approach as that film and depicts quasi-underage love (he was 17; she was 15) as some kind of dangerous mental affliction that will burn down both homes and lives with its unstoppable passion. For starters, both our endless lovers here – small town mechanic and country club valet David (Alex Pettyfer) and rich girl Jade (Gabriella Wilde), who’s spent the last few years in a social isolation chamber after the death of her brother Chris – are firmly of age, with the film’s opening scene showing the pair of them graduating from high school.
20 February 2014
Adele (Adèle Exarchopoulos) is a high school student in modern-day France where just about every book they study has some bearing on her personal life. Something a little less relevant is her peers’ obsession with boys. She acts interested but her heart isn’t in it – and then one glance at a mysterious blue-haired woman (Léa Seydoux) is enough to send her heart (and other regions) a-flutter. As Adele explores her attraction to women, her path and Emma’s crosses again and they become friends, then more than friends, and if you were wondering what “more than friends” actually means, there’s a ten minute sex scene just to make it clear.
20 February 2014
When Texas rodeo cowboy and electrician Ron Woodroof (Matthew McConaughey) wakes up in hospital with thirty days to live, he’s not happy. As a (generally) straight non-junkie, HIV is not something he’s supposed to have in 1985. His friends promptly shun him and trash his house. The treatment available does nothing. So he does what a hustler does – he pays an orderly to steal him a supply of AZT, a drug that, maybe, might help.
6 February 2014
Biopics that attempt to cover the whole life of their subject often end up just skimming the surface. It’s just not possible to fit an entire life into a feature-length film, even if a big chunk of that life was spent in a prison cell. This follows the life of Mandela (Idris Elba), starting from his days as a young lawyer in South Africa. Initially more interested in the ladies than in revolution, he gradually became more involved in the anti-apartheid movement, first following the non-violent model set out by Gandhi in India, then moving towards armed struggle when the regime cracked down.
6 February 2014
The year is 1987. Adele Wheeler (Kate Winslet) is a single mom living in a rural home with her 13-year-old son, Henry (Gattlin Griffith). Depressed ever since her husband left her (not because she misses him, we’re told, but because she “loves love”), she now rarely leaves the house; so it’s just bad luck that she’s shopping with Henry when a dodgy type with a bloodstained t-shirt comes up to them and tells them that their giving him a lift “needs to happen”.
6 February 2014
While in theory it’s a good thing that Hollywood has finally realised old(er) people go to the movies, in practice this has led to the creation of Last Vegas. Which is a bad thing. Not that it starts out that way: Billy (Michael Douglas), Paddy (Robert De Niro), Archie (Morgan Freeman) and Sam (Kevin Kline) have been best friends since childhood. Now Billy is getting married – to a woman well under half his age, who he proposed to at a funeral – and he wants his best buds to be there on his bachelor weekend in Las Vegas.
