It’s a bit of a contradiction when you walk into a film with no idea of what to expect and walk out somehow disappointed.
This is certainly true in the case of Frank, a quirky little indie dramedy from director Lenny Abrahamson.…
Category: Reviews
Blue Ruin’s cautionary tale is Death Wish meets the Hatfield-McCoys
Real life isn’t like the movies.
True love is not the inevitable outcome of a tempestuous first meeting and cars don’t blow up just because you put a few bullets in them. It’s this reality that is at the heart of Blue Ruin.…
Brick Mansions is not quite solid cinema
It’s a sad fact of life that actors die during filming.
Not only is their passing tragic at whatever age, it has the added effect of leaving their final work unfinished. There are, of course, ways around this.
When screen veteran Oliver Reed died before shooting all his scenes for Gladiator, the filmmakers used a body double and CGI to depict the altered fate of his character, Proximo.…
The Machine can’t quite locate a soul amid the moving parts
As productions, Transcendence and The Machine couldn’t be further apart.
The first is a $100 million Hollywood blockbuster starring Johnny Depp; the second was shot on 1% of that budget with a British TV actor best known as the villain from Die Another Day.…
The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is shockingly average
It is a truth universally acknowledged that the middle film in a trilogy tends to be the best.
Movie lovers may be torn between The Godfather and Godfather, Part II, but the rule certainly holds true for The Empire Strikes Back, Terminator 2, The Dark Knight.…
Transcendence gets stuck in the existential mud
As grand themes go, self-awareness is certainly one of the grandest. Descartes’ famous proposition “I think therefore I am” is arguably the foundation of all Western philosophy.
After all, without self, without thought, there can be no perception therefore no knowledge.…
Noah will have you in floods (of something)
When you think of marketable movie types, you probably think rom-com or superhero movie.
It’s unlikely your mind would go straight to Biblical epic. Cinematic tales of lions, Christians, and Roman arenas went out with Cecil B. DeMille.
Then again, to those long awaiting a resurgence, Darren Aronofsky is certainly a promising choice of director.…
Calvary is a profane, heartbreaking spiritual journey
There are plenty of filmmaking sibling duos out there – the Coen Brothers, the Dardenne brothers, the Wachowskis – but it’s rare for them to work completely independently of each other.
In 2008, playwright Martin McDonagh made his break into film with In Bruges, a dark comedy about two hitmen hiding out in the Medieval Flemish city; three years later, his brother John Michael McDonagh made his film debut in the form of The Guard, about a hedonistic but thoughtful Connemara constable.…
The Men Who Stare At Goats is a hippy-dippy look at an unlikely New Age army training unit
Meet the Jedi Knights.
They can become invisible to the human eye, phase through solid objects, even kill you with a single touch (though it may take several decades to come into effect). And they work for the U.S. Army. This was the remit of the First Earth Battalion and they were real.
Under The Skin gets to the heart of what it means to be human
For a film that features Scarlett Johansson as a skin-stealing alien seductress, there’s nothing remotely titillating about Under the Skin.
Based on a book by Scottish immigrant Michel Faber, it’s Jonathan Glazer’s first film since Birth back in 2004.…