This film – based on the best selling book by Jodi Picoult - starts as an exploration of the ethics of organ-donation and genetic selection, but rapidly disintegrates into a sloppy, unstructured, tear-jerking mess - unclear about who’s story is being told or indeed what the point is. The screen adaptation by Jeremy Leven is […]
This low budget Aussie film about three young men of Middle-Eastern descent who dabble in drug crime is slow to get going, but survives on excellent performances from the core cast before it really hits its straps in the last twenty minutes. It’s a contemporary urban gangster flick that immerses us deeply and realistically in […]
Sam Raimi, director of Drag Me To Hell, is no stranger to the horror genre, having directed the classic horror of the Evil Dead trilogy, pretty much perfecting the mesh of horror and comedy by the time he got to Army of Darkness (Evil Dead 3). In the 32 years of his career, he has […]
John Woo – the Hong-Kong action director who moved to Hollywood in 1993 (Face/Off, Mission Impossible II) - returns to his roots to make the most expensive Chinese language movie of all time. Based on the historical Battle of Red Cliffs that took place on the Yangtze River in the year 208, Woo – like […]
The classic movie approach to the prison breakout is to follow first the planning of the escape and then its execution. Once we’ve got to know the characters involved and the reasons for their need to escape, we’re ready to support them through bars, walls, tunnels and locked doors – and we become as distressed […]
Beautifully shot but far from beautiful in subject matter, Last Ride is a hybrid of genres – a road movie, a film about the bond between a father and son, and a whodunit (actually, a what-did-he-do) – sustained throughout by a nuanced performance from Hugo Weaving. Weaving plays Kev, a tattoo-strewn and physically ravaged career […]
As I walk from the theatre having seen Sunshine Cleaning, I am reminded of the song At Seventeen. In it, the precocious Janis Ian lamented that love was meant for beauty queens and high school girls with clean-skin smiles, not for ugly ducklings like her. Rose Lorkowski, Amy Adam’s character in Sunshine Cleaning, was one […]
Only a week ago I listened to two older teenage girls lamenting the taste of 12 year-olds. “They’ve never even heard of S Club 7,” says one, “or the Spice Girls!” “Ohmygod” says the other with disgust. “They probably, like, only listen to Hannah Montana!” And if you’ve neither seen nor heard of the Disney […]
For a country like Indonesia, with close to 50 million people living in poverty, world demand for crops like palm oil mean a potentially lucrative source of income and livelihood for many, however it also means that areas of forest the size of Denmark are cleared in Indonesia every year to make way for plantations. […]
Once upon a time, in a land far far away, let’s call it England, there was a film director with a very promising career. He opened well with a fabulously sexy take on Shakespeare’s Othello, before flourishing in a series of uptight drawing-room comedies, but despite his fine way with British humour, this chap – […]
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