Screenwize - Writing About Film
Mark Wahlberg plays another working class action hero in this gritty but convoluted story about double-dealing smugglers, wharfside corruption and family revenge. It’s a remake of an Icelandic thriller from 2008 which was produced by actor Baltasar Kormakur, who is in the director’s chair for this US$25 million Hollywood remake for Universal studios. (more…)
A moving portrait of the man who was the inspiration for Nicolas Evans’ novel The Horse Whisperer, this film picked up the audience award for Best Documentary at last year’s Canberra International Film Festival and is a much loved film about a lot more than horses. (more…)
Light and fluffy as a cupcake, Katherine Heigl’s many talents are truly wasted in this story based on the first of eighteen best-selling Stephanie Plum novels. With critics giving the film a huge thumbs down and box-office business in America only buoyed by massive discount ticket schemes, it may also be the last we see of Stephanie Plum. (more…)
Traditional print media has been much in the news lately, with the most constant story over the last five years the impending death of the newspaper. Print journalism, it seems, is on its last legs – driven to bankruptcy by rising costs, falling advertising revenues and the availability of free content on the internet – the enemy (or the future) of traditional mastheads. And one of the most famous newspapers in the world to have its demise regularly and exaggeratedly reported is the New York Times, first published in 1851 and a record holder of Pulitzer prizes. It’s timely then that filmmaker Andrew Rossi should spend a year inside the famous institution, documenting the way the business works and how it’s responding to the new wave of bloggers and tweeters. (more…)
Uninspiring and insipid, this contemporary take on the zombie genre sees a group of gorgeous twenty somethings trapped in Moscow trying desperately to get away from an endless attack launched by nasty id-like blobs of energy. (more…)
Despite a quite extraordinary performance from Meryl Streep, this is a deeply disappointing film, plagued by a dreadful structure and the surprisingly strange decision to frame the story around a senile and rather pathetic Baroness Thatcher, sadly musing over the ghost of her husband Dennis. As she wanders around her house, her mind wanders further, flashing back in time to key moments in a career that made a determined young woman Britain’s first female Prime Minister. It’s watchable only because of the technical virtuosity of Streep who inhabits the character so fully that it becomes hard to imagine Margaret Thatcher as anything other than this. (more…)
From Spanish auteur Pedro Almodovar (Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown, All About My Mother) comes a twisted mad-scientist fable, with Antonio Banderas cast as a wealthy surgeon experimenting with bizarre plastic surgery in an isolated, art-filled mansion. With a deliberately preposterous storyline involving burning bodies, evil brothers, rape, suicide, revenge, sexual identity and medical procedure, this is darkly comic arthouse soap – with a tinge of horror – and definitely an acquired taste. (more…)
Incoherent and inconsistent, this martial arts action-adventure spectacular from master Hong Kong director Hark Tsui is yet another disappointing outing for actor Jet Li, with 3D unable to add anything extra special to the wuxia genre. The action is dominated by wire work – with characters spinning and jumping impossibly as they fight it out with swords, daggers and throwing knives, but the story starts spinning out of control as well, as too many plotlines compete for attention. (more…)
Wickedly original and smartly entertaining, The Guard stars beefy Irishman Brendan Gleeson as the kind of anti-super-hero we just want more of: he may not be able to leap even very small things in a single bound, but he’ll drop a bad guy with a withering one-liner or a profane comment that lies somewhere between cunning and innocence. Written and directed by John Michael McDonagh, the film comes alive through Gleeson’s inspired performance as a small town policeman who knows enough about life – in a very laissez-faire kind of way - to handle anything that comes his direction. (more…)
Both the title and the top billing of Robert de Niro and Monica Belluci are somewhat misleading in this three-part portmanteau film, comprising separate comic tales of love and lovers – all with a distinctly Italian flavour. (more…)
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