Month: August 2014

Night Moves is dead in the water

 

On first glance, you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d seen Night Moves before.

A tale of ambitious eco-terrorists directed by a well-respected, if relatively little-known indie director, featuring an emotionally guarded lead, a maturing young actress, and a Scandinavian-sounding “leader”.…

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For shows a franchise that should have stayed buried

 

Hollywood is usually pretty quick off the bat on commissioning sequels – often a picture’s barely made it into cinemas before a follow-up’s been green-lit – but every now and then they leave us twiddling our thumbs.

It’s been nine years since Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller’s hyper-visual, hyper-violent Sin City made its way onto our screens, long enough that even the most ardent fan had given up hope of a second installment.…

A Most Wanted Man is a fitting elegy to a tremendous talent (RIP, Phillip Seymour Hoffman)

 

Anton Corbijn’s A Most Wanted Man has the distinction of being not only the first John Le Carré adaptation to reach our screens since Tomas Alfredson’s critically acclaimed Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy back in 2011, but also the last leading role of Phillip Seymour Hoffman, who passed away back in February.

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Get On Up proves there’s still some soul in the music biopic

 

For a brief time in the mid 2000s, the ’50s-60s musician biopic was the genre du jour.

The life stories of Johnny Cash and Ray Charles both hit the big screen in little over twelve months; the abstracted travails of Bob Dylan reached us two years later in the form of I’m Not There.…

Guardians of the Galaxy could be a brave new world for Marvel

 

Having come to define the superhero genre, after nine films and six years, Marvel has finally dared to go a little weird.

While there’s a definite built-in audience for the likes of Iron Man and Captain America, the Guardians of the Galaxy are relative unknowns.…