For Almodóvar, to lose your sight is to lose your visions, or at least your grasp on them. Abrazos Rotos is enough simply for being an Almodóvar film, and despite its few shortcomings it’s an excellent contribution to his ongoing oeuvre. .
Directed by Pedro Almodovar
After Live Flesh, All About My Mother and Volver, director Pedro [...]
“the violence makes the film seem like a throwback to action movies of the 1990’s, the decade in which Mel Gibson’s star was at its brightest.”
Edge of Darkness
Directed by Martin Campbell
Martin Campbell is best known for rebooting the dated James Bond franchise with the excellent Casino Royale. In that film the director brought an edgy, [...]
Un Prophète
Directed by Jacques Audiard
Director Jacques Audiard is carving quite a career as one of the most searingly talented French auteurs working today. Cresting on the wave of a number of well-received, robust Parisian thrillers including Read My Lips and The Beat That My Heart Skipped comes Audiard’s latest blistering entry to the crime genre, an heir [...]
Daybreakers
Directed by Michael and Peter Spierig
Over the years several pairs of brothers have directed high-grossing, successful Hollywood films. Notable duos include the Cohen’s, the Wachowski’s, the Hughes’ and the Farrelly’s. However, the Spierig brothers from Australia will never, ever be on that list.
They are responsible for the abysmal mess entitled Daybreakers, the latest film to [...]
BEYOND THE POLE
Directed by David L Williams
“Don’t be impotent. Be important!” Tackling climate change might not seem like an obvious subject for a comedy – especially in the wake of Copenhagen – but the heroes of this new British mockumentary are more than just the sum just of their catchy t-shirt slogans.
There’s no Al Gore-style [...]
Big River Man
Directed by John Maringouin
He’s an overweight 53-year-old man who used to be a professional gambler. He now teaches flamenco guitar for a living. He regularly drinks and drives, eats horse burgers, and spends his days in underground caves learning how to think like an animal. He is also ‘the world’s last superhero.’ Meet [...]
The Lovely Bones
Directed by Peter Jackson
At this point, Peter Jackson probably isn’t the sort of filmmaker who gets to hear “no” very often. After satisfying nearly all parties – from the studios to the fanboys – with his 11-hour Lord of the Rings trilogy, and delivering a generally crowd-pleasing smash with 2005’s King Kong, he [...]
A Single Man
Directed by Tom Ford
With fashion supremo Tom Ford at the helm, the very least you’d expect from this adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s novel is a parade of gorgeous men in well-cut suits. There’s certainly enough Kennedy-era period detail here to satisfy the most ardent fan of Mad Men (along with an uncredited voice [...]
Me and Orson Welles
Richard Linklater
In lesser hands, Me and Orson Welles might have been a grandiose love letter to the magic of theatre and the wonder of young love. The audience could have laughed at the charming exploits of that wild eccentric Welles and rooted blindly for the dashing young hero Zac Efron as Welles takes [...]
Brothers
Directed by Jim Sheridan
The latest in a long line of Sheridan dramas oriented around family units, Brothers, adapted from the 2004 Danish feature of the same name, is competently constructed and generally well-performed, but hovers just above mediocrity throughout the proceedings. Perhaps in the post-Rachel Getting Married / A Christmas Tale landscape, we’ve come to [...]
Up In The Air
Directed by Jason Reitman
Obscure alt-culture references are nowhere to be found in Jason Reitman`s follow-up to his sharply divisive runaway smash Juno. Instead, Up In the Air turns sharply towards the dramatic, a move that proved mildly disastrous for fellow comedy dynamo Judd Apatow just a few months ago, [...]
The Twilight Saga: New Moon
Directed by Chris Weitz
Are we to expect more from a feature film than from an average episode of a daytime soap? That’s one of many questions to be begged not only of casual moviegoers but of even the most hardened fan of Stephenie Meyer’s socially negligent Twilight series as they take [...]
2012
Directed by Roland Emmerich
This review is SPOILER ridden so beware. Then again, if you’ve seen any disaster movie made since 1960 then nothing will be a surprise. Trust me.
Judd Apatow, Tina Fey, Ben Stiller, Will Ferrell and all the other maestros of contemporary comedy should be afraid, as there is a new clown in town: [...]
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
Dir. John Krasinski
John Krasinski deserves some enormous kudos for bringing such a faithful, intelligently constructed and nontraditional adaptation of David Foster Wallace’s writing to the screen–even a flawed one such as Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Wallace’s work defies filmic adaptation, and it takes incredible heart and chutzpah to even try, much [...]
Black Dynamite
Directed by Scott Sanders
Michael Jai White is Black Dynamite, the legendary gun-toting, two-fisted, Afro-wearing Vietnam vet, now a legendary ghetto hero. In the course of investigating his brother’s death, Dynamite stumbles on a plot to compromise “black manhood” with a secret weapon disguised as malt liquor. Set in 1972, the film follows our hero [...]
