Michael Shannon first came to our attention fully in psychological hurricane drama Take Shelter back in 2011. Since then his natural talent for subtly portraying emotionally scarred characters dealing with inner personal turmoil has captivated and fascinated. Ariel Vromen’s The Iceman in which the actor plays the lead of the same name is the cream [...]

Think ‘Twilight on the English Rivera’ but all the more seedier and desolate, Neil Jordan style. The director who admits to being ‘fascinated by monsters and monstrous people’ shows a sensitive side to the plight of the creatures of the night in his latest film Byzantium, taking note of the recent appeal of vampire films [...]

“Looks can be deceiving. I am a lover of America,” Changez Khan, a young Pakistani professor suspected of being a terrorist, tells American journalist Bobby Lincoln in a heaving tea house in Lahore. That remark and subsequent interview reflects the mutual suspicions between the two men who symbolise the tensions between East and West in [...]

Like the characters in the franchise, director Justin Lin reassembles his trustworthy team of writers Chris Morgan and Gary Scott Thompson to pen another episode of the adrenaline-pumping, big-action smashing and testosterone-dripping Fast & Furious mayhem that throws reality and caution to the wind in Version 6. Rio’s favelas played host last time in 2011 [...]

It seems cameraman-cum-director Craig Viveiros fancies himself as a bit of a ‘British Tarantino’ with his second feature, The Liability. He even employs the services of one of Pulp Fiction and Resevoir Dogs’ actors, Tim Roth, to evoke that clever magic. Indeed, at the heart of this road movie is a more superior, darkly comedic [...]

You can imagine that a literary adaptation set in the self-indulgent Roaring Twenties about a fateful love story that’s given the Baz Luhrmann touch would be as extravagant as ever. Think Moulin Rouge. Indeed the flamboyant director does not hold back with his version of The Great Gatsby and even tries to shoehorn in a [...]

Having not necessarily seen the poster, the film title automatically assumes a plane takeover at several thousand feet, like so many films before. However, this is a story of ‘terrorists at sea’ with writer-director Tobias Lindholm of recent The Hunt fame putting to bed the romantic notion of swashbuckling pirates with a frank and tension-pounding [...]

With the success of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (the original version) under his belt, plus the chance to work with leading lady Noomi Rapace once more, it was never going to be long before Danish director Niels Arden Oplev tried his hand at Hollywood revenge to further demonstrate his film-making skill. More exciting [...]

Blue Valentine director Derek Cianfrance’s second film, The Place Beyond The Pines, offers a similar moving and volatile storyline of familiar relationships as his latter. The comparison is made all the more apparent by the reappearance of ‘man of the moment’ Ryan Gosling who has made an art of brooding in quiet, pained expression of [...]