The Salvation isn’t looking to redeem anyone

 

As the oldest film genre – the first ever feature, The Story of the Kelly Gang, arguably qualifies as one – the Western weaves a well-worn path through the cinematic landscape.

There are certain elements we’ve come to expect from tales of those rangy, ranging men, like the redemptive arc of our hard-bitten protagonist, and those we haven’t, like an abundance of CGI.…

Black Sea wrings some suspense out of a tired tub of a genre

 

Take a dangerous group of men and trap them in a lethal environment with the promise of seemingly infinite riches at their fingertips.

It’s a tried and tested premise that’s been been striking sparks since The Treasure of the Sierra Madre almost seventy years ago.…

Lost River winnows away into nothingness

 

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a lost river as “a surface stream that flows into an underground passageway.”

Appropriately, Ryan Gosling’s directorial debut of the same name is all about the lurid surfaces and obscure depths, and cuts a wide and muddy channel across the cinematic landscape.…

John Wick burns cool and bright

 

Like Nicholas Cage or Christopher Walken, Keanu Reeves is a very particular type of actor, a specialised tool best used in a particular context.

Put him a role that requires emotional heft and he’s wooden; give him an accent to master or reams of dialogue, like in Dracula or Much Ado About Nothing, and he flounders.…

Furious 7 provides thrills, spills, and a surprisingly moving farewell (RIP, Paul Walker)

 

Fast cars and beautiful women. Gunfights in exotic locales. You could be talking of any one of half a dozen franchises: Mission: Impossible, James Bond. They all offer similar thrills and spills, albeit in hugely different styles. In recent years, however, the Fast & Furious franchise has overtaken them all.

Chappie: more bats**t conceptual sci-fi from Neil Blomkamp

 

Forget about Paul Verhoeven. Step aside, the Wachowskis. There’s a new master in town when it comes to bats**t conceptual sci-fi.

South African director Neil Blomkamp is well known for his allegorical social commentary – apartheid in District 9, health care and the 1% in Elysium – but the underpinnings of Chappie are mainly philosophical.…

It Follows is a brilliant, terrifying paean to the Carpenter tradition

 

Is there any genre that has defined a decade as much as horror defined the ‘80s – and visa versa, of course

From The Thing to Day of the Dead, they brought psychological insight to a form otherwise defined by B-movie schlock.…

Focus is on the ball but only knows one trick

 

How invested can you get in a film where you can’t trust anything that’s on screen, let alone any of the characters’ motivations?

From The Sting through to American Hustle, the con-artist thriller is a genre known for its slickness, its unpredictability and slight-of-hand.…

Predestination is a slick, hermetically-sealed sci-fi treat

 

Is there any genre with more potential for ideas than sci-fi?

Not restricted to the realms of the realistic or the possible, yet generally ruled by the same forces that make our world tick, science fiction is a way of deconstructing the human experience, of really getting to the heart of our identity, who we are, where we’re going. …

Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter is on a quest for oblivion

 

As cinematic provenances go, Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter has a fairly tortured one.

A “true story” based on an urban legend based on events that took place in Minnesota in 2001, the film follows the misguided adventurers of the eponymous Kumiko (Babel’s Rinko Kikuchi), an office drone in Tokyo who becomes obsessed with finding the treasure buried at the end of Fargo.…