Reviews in a nutshell
The British 1971 original by Sam Peckinpah both appalled and enthralled an unsuspecting audience, like an unwanted mirror held up to reflect some of the most primitive and raw human nature ever captured on screen when the chips are down. There was a distinct difference between the act of rape as one of empowerment, as …
Looking for a no-brainer to delight you while you munch on some deserved popcorn at the end of a long week? Director Brett Ratner may have come up with one of his best movies since Rush Hour (the original) yet – and there is no sign of Don Cheadle, Chris Tucker, Jackie Chan or Ken Leung …
You’d be forgiven for thinking that Bond director Marc Forster and screenwriter Jason Keller’s new drama Machine Gun Preacher was a fictitious and rather cheap attempt by Hollywood at raising the plight of Africa’s war-ravaged areas, had you not heard of Sam Childers. Indeed, such is the worthiness of what goes on in the film …
Gattaca writer-director Andrew Niccol is normally apt at looking at current social issues in a near-future or parallel sci-fi world context. In Time appears to explore our obsession with youth, the death of urgency and the distribution of wealth – the latter being very topical at present with the global ‘Occupy’ anti-capitalist protests. However, Niccol’s latest …
Adopting the frantic, hand-held documentary style of other gritty, foreign kitchen-sink offerings, Mexican writer-director Gerardo Naranjo’s explosive look at the dominant drugs culture in his country through the eyes of a young woman, Laura Guerrero (Stephanie Sigman), is a sure-fire festival contender worthy of a look. Laura dreams of being the next Miss Mexico and …
With Indiana Jones getting way past his prime – watching an older Harrison Ford leaping over containers in the opening scenes of the 2008 Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull brought tears to the eyes, while the potential of Shia LaBeouf filling his screen father’s boots was silently quash after the same …
Continue reading “The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn”
It seems that every film-maker going after the youth market is adding gadgets and robots to films, as if the human interest side of their stories is not enough to keep the younger, video-gaming generation engaged. So it’s great to see a robot film that concentrates on the human relationships for once, and one that …
Author Alexandre Dumas‘s classic novel The Three Musketeers has been done to death, time and time again. None so like this swashbuckling silliness that’s child-friendly and borrows heavily from Gulliver’s Travels and the success of the Pirates franchise. Paul W.S. Anderson’s film centres on young hothead D’Artagnan (Logan Lerman) – as well as lots of …
Cynics might be too quick to mock the news of another Johnny English film. But Johnny English Reborn is one example of a sequel that knocks spots off the original, which admittedly wasn’t hard, purely because those involved have had eight years to mull over the mistakes made in the first to now offer a …
