What do superheroes do when they’re bored with their job and just can’t get enough respect? Get depressed and take to drink of course - just like mere mortals. This is the fresh idea behind the superhero movie Hancock. Jon Hancock (Will Smith) drinks too much, sleeps on park benches, insults everyone and really […]
In 1942 Nazi intelligence officers hatched a devious plan to bring down the economies of Britain and America. They would establish, behind the gates of Sachsenhausen concentration camp north of Berlin, a counterfeiting operation and flood the economies of their enemies with forged bank notes. The plan, known as Operation Bernhard, involved a team of […]
A patchy updating of the bumbling spy series - originally a Mel Brooks spoof of James Bond made for television. Steve Carell and Anne Hathaway are both perfectly cast as Agents 23 and 99 but are let down by a script that jars unevenly from over-the-top action sequences to static dry humour, from George Bush […]
For fans of British writer-director Mike Leigh (who made Secrets & Lies, Naked and Vera Drake) Happy Go Lucky will be a real treat. It’s a life-affirming film driven by the strong performances that Leigh always extracts from his cast, but this time dipped in good-natured humour. If you’ve always found Mike Leigh’s work […]
It is one of the most iconic film posters of the last fifty years. A shapely female leg splits the image horizontally, stocking half way off, or half way on – it doesn’t really matter, you get the picture. Beyond the leg, in the background, is a fully dressed young man with a distinctly bemused […]
Willam McInnes reckons that the best performance in his latest film Unfinished Sky comes from Milo, a blue-heeler. “I was watching the rushes and I realised that Milo was just being,” says McInnes in his distinctive Aussie drawl. “The hardest thing to do as an actor is just to be, just to exist. There’s a […]
Werner Herzog has always been attracted to driven characters: men (for there are few women in his films) on the edge of a madness for life, pushing boundaries, pushing other people, pushing themselves. In two of his most well known films - Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo - the men grappling with the […]
The star system is often the hardest part of writing a film review, and quite a bugbear for a film critic. A deeply thought out and interesting film by a major talent that doesn’t quite deliver on its intentions might only deserve one or two stars. On the other end of the spectrum, however, are […]
For a certain demographic, at a certain time, Darren Starr’s television series of Sex and the City, from Candace Bushnell’s book, captured the zeitgeist – a show with four archetypes – career woman, free spirit, earth mother, whore – in whom each viewer could find someone to relate, and in whose antics they saw their […]
There’s something slightly regal about the tall and elegant figure of Bryan Brown as he strides across the hotel lobby, but once we sit and start talking his familiar Aussie accent and highly affable approach to life leaves nothing in the air but charm and ease. It’s this combination of striking physical presence and everyman […]
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