Reviews in a nutshell
Effective horror films these days are harder and harder to come by. But it all depends on what you want from the genre? In Insidious, Saw creators Wan and Whannell appear to have collected together all their favourite horror elements from scary classics – namely Poltergeist, The Amityville Horror and The Shining – but not …
What strikes an instant chord with The Vanguard writer/director Matthew Hope’s The Veteran are real-life newspaper reports of servicemen and women returning from tours of duty and finding a lack of support for civvy life. Then there are the proposed defence cuts in a time when conflicts aboard seem to be escalating. It’s hard not …
‘We’re all just selling something’ is the weighty moral of Youth In Revolt director Miguel Arteta’s new coming-of-age comedy, and without the intriguing (and unlikely) pairing of Ed Helms and John C. Reilly, it could be argued that marketing a film about a naïve insurance salesman from small-town, Midwest America who discovers himself on a …
Petrol heads unite; it’s the return of throbbing muscle cars tearing up the streets and desert highways with a bunch of thrill-seeking car enthusiasts at the wheel. Well, kind of, but the noise and adrenaline is certainly still there in full dramatic force. Once you’ve adjusted your ears, seasoned Fast franchise director Justin Lin throws …
Love him or loathe him, there’s just no stopping the publicity juggernaut that is Brand at the moment – on both sides of the pond. Or is there? Those (seemingly) loyal to the Oscar-winning 1981 version of Arthur, starring the lovable late Dudley Moore, were especially keen in the US to get the knives out …
Although adapted from the first novel in a series by John Marsden about an invasion and occupation of Australia by a ‘foreign power’, you can’t help thinking while watching Tomorrow, When The War Began, “Crickey, the Japanese are coming!” This rather untimely inappropriate and harsh fictional assumption, given recent natural disasters in the Land of …
You can’t deny that a film’s synopsis about a bunch of activists chasing a bunch of semi-naked hunt supporters across the Scottish glens doesn’t sound a tad appealing? And that’s the immediate hook of debut director Edward Boase’s new ‘blood sports’ film, Blooded. The first issue to overcome, though, is ‘realism syndrome’, where everything slightly …
It’s too easy to be blasé about visual maestro Zack Snyder’s new film Sucker Punch, and call it gaming-action porn with scantily-clad women – the opposite of the half-naked 300 men. Just as its Japanese manga influences revel in dubious paedophilia-like images of prepubescent schoolgirls kicking ass, this film could easily be dismissed as a …
With the acclaimed Moon, his debut film under his belt, Duncan Jones is fast proving to be a master of sci-fi mystery, a scholar of MacGuffin in his film plots. Source Code is no exception. It toys with its lead character, US Army pilot Colter Stevens, played by Jake Gyllenhaal – no stranger to military …
