Mad Max: Fury Road is THE road movie
Though he’s now best known for his racist/anti-semitic/domestic abuse tendencies, sadly, Mel Gibson was once, lest we forget, a major international superstar.
An Oscar-winning actor-director with at least three iconic roles (including Scottish legend William Wallace in Braveheart and Lethal Weapons’ memorably unstable Martin Riggs) and more than a billion at the box office.
With The Greater Good, Spooks makes a leap to the big screen and stumbles
When is the time to let TV go?
Some shows run out the clock, reaching their natural conclusion, however unsatisfactorily (see: Lost). Others are wrenched away from us before they seem to achieve their full potential (see: Firefly).…
The Theory of Everything forgets about the numbers so ends up playing by them
James Marsh’s new film, a biopic of legendary astrophysicist Stephen Hawking and his first wife Jane Wilde, is firstly a very traditionally British film; which is to say, a very reserved one.
In the face of tragedy – the gradual debilitation of a vibrant person – there’s nary a tear shed.…
Unbroken is too polished for its own good
War stories tend to have two major themes: man’s inhumanity to man and/or the triumph of the human spirit.
While plenty of films in recent years have focused on the later, most recently Fury, it’s been a while since we’ve had an account of unvarnished heroism.…
What We Do in the Shadows is silly, macabre fun
For all the variations of the zombie movie out there – standard horror, Nazisploitation, the zomcom – it’s a bit of a surprise there aren’t more takes on the vampire.
Their slightly more refined brethren, for all that velvet, lace, and eyeliner, have been played surprisingly “straight”.…
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.…