Reviews in a nutshell
Has potential but follows the wrong lead story. It needed to be strong to justify it being made. It does feel lacking though, without its key character Snow White, even though Frozen fans can get to fantasise about a live-action Elsa.
Nothing, it seems, human or inanimate, goes to waste here, making The Martian a very satisfying watch and a return to the Scott glory days.
You don’t expect anything less rigorously researched from the engaging filmmaking pair behind the 2008 hit, The Hurt Locker, Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter/former news journalist Mark Boal. Their latest action thriller, Zero Dark Thirty does not fail to diligently lay out the facts like some on-the-scene reporter with ‘access all areas’ coverage. However, …
Part The Hurt Locker meets Shakespearean war documentary, debut director Ralph Fiennes thrashes out the sound of conflict with a war of words in his cinema adaptation of his acclaimed stage play, and the British bard’s tragedy, Coriolanus. Refusing to pander to popular rule and the wishes of his dominant mother, Volumnia (Vanessa Redgrave), celebrated …
Writer-director Jeff Nichols stays close to his Southern roots again with another intensely powerful look at complex family relationships in Take Shelter, starring his Shotgun Stories lead, Michael Shannon, once more. Admittedly, Take Shelter is one of the most original familiar studies to come to the big screen in a long time, set against an …
Influential films featuring an all-female cast are surprisingly few and far between, especially such projects that allow the actors to deliver a career-defining punch. Based on the New York Times best-selling debut novel of the same name from Kathryn Stockett, writer/director Tate Taylor takes its subject matter to heart – he and Stockett are childhood …
The role of retired Mossad secret agent Rachel Singer in John Madden’s new espionage thriller, The Debt, is a highly fitting one for the immense on-screen talent, presence and investigative skills of actress Helen Mirren, no stranger to weeding out corrupt elements of society in her stint as TV’s Supt. Jane Tennison. But those banking …
