Monday, May 20th, 2013

Reviews

  • Rock wrestles with dramatic role

    Putting ex-WWE wrestler turned action-hero superstar Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson in an action movie and not letting him perform any stunts is like putting Arnold Schwarzenegger in a Shakespeare film or Woody Allen in an action film. There's something not quite right about it.

    May 17, 2013, 2:32 pm

  • Neighbours in turmoil

    Why do only bad things happen, asks 11-year-old Skunk of her father. Well, good things do happen too, replies her father, trying to reassure his daughter.

    May 17, 2013, 2:18 pm

  • Bloody, not scary

    Cabin in the woods? Check! Five 20-somethings there for the weekend? Check! Book of the dead? Check! Demons in the dungeon? Check! Chainsaws, self-mutilation and tree rape? Check, check, check.

    May 13, 2013, 3:15 pm

  • Sins of the father

    At last! Here's a film to help you forget all those big, dumb blockbusters of late - I'm talking about you, A Good Day to Die Hard - and restore your faith in bold, ambitious, original works of art and the filmmakers behind them.

    May 10, 2013, 3:16 pm

  • Sex, drugs and guns hide satire

    When the lights came up at the preview screening of Spring Breakers a colleague quipped, with a look of such disgust he might have bitten into a piece of rotten fruit: "That's two hours of my life I won't get back."

    May 10, 2013, 9:00 am

  • Fantasy injects life into real-time issues

    Hollywood has been remaking French movies for decades so we can forgive the French for ripping off their American cousins with Camille Rewinds, a redo of Francis Ford Coppola's well-regarded 1986 time-travel romance Peggy Sue Got Married.

    May 3, 2013, 11:45 am

  • Local surf saga misses its wave

    The story of how the surf industry rose from the beaches of Australia and its druggy counterculture in the late 1960s and early 70s to swamp the world is fascinating, the unlikely tale of those who dropped out to follow their bliss transforming the society they rejected.

    May 2, 2013, 3:15 pm

  • Plot drizzles to tedious anticlimax

    Comedy-drama is a dubious tag for the new period film Cheerful Weather for the Wedding from director Donald Rice.

    April 29, 2013, 12:15 pm

  • Fracking fracas digs deep

    Matt Damon making a drama about the pressing environmental issue of fracking is for many like sprinkling bran on your muesli.

    April 26, 2013, 3:00 pm

  • Serving it up to a president

    Pixar's 2007 classic Ratatouille plated up one of the great climaxes of the decade - that delicious, deeply moving moment when miserable food critic Anton Ego tastes the down-to-earth dish of the title cooked by Remy the long-tailed culinary genius and is sent tumbling back to his rural childhood.

    April 26, 2013, 12:10 pm

  • REVIEW: Olympus Has Fallen

    In movie terms, the months of March and April are known as the post-Oscar dumping ground, when all the left-over and difficult-to-release films are dropped in after the awards season in the hope of making a buck or cutting their losses.

    April 24, 2013, 12:10 pm

  • REVIEW: The Company You Keep

    There's never a good time to release a film in the US sympathetic to radicals of the late 1960s and 70s who resorted to violence to get their message across.

    April 24, 2013, 12:00 pm

  • REVIEW: Return to Nim's Island

    Sadly, Brendan Maher's sequel lacks the same star power as the original, which is largely its downfall, and the film, while entertaining enough for the younger kids, plays out more like a Sunday afternoon made-for-TV movie.

    April 22, 2013, 1:37 pm

  • REVIEW: The Other Son

    The switched-at-birth scenario is so familiar in American popular culture it takes a daring filmmaker to apply it to a situation as fraught as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

    April 19, 2013, 7:35 am

  • REVIEW: Warm Bodies

    Step aside, vampires, you're so last year! Zombies are the new in-thing among the undead.

    April 18, 2013, 7:30 am

  • REVIEW: Therese Desqueyroux

    At first glance this adaptation of Francois Mauriac's 1927 novel about a woman trapped in a loveless marriage seems to be yet another polished French-language period drama that affirms our view of the past - that husbands were patriarchal boors, wives were long suffering and fashion and country homes were to die for.

    April 16, 2013, 10:24 am

  • REVIEW: Kon-Tiki

    It was one of the greatest scientific experiments of the 20th century and rivalled the daring, dangerous achievements of Hillary, Armstrong and Shackleton.

    April 11, 2013, 12:30 pm

  • REVIEW: The Loneliest Planet

    Anyone who has travelled for longish periods in the company of others knows that a shared exotic experience can cement a relationship or can drive a wedge so deep it never recovers.

    April 11, 2013, 8:15 am

  • REVIEW: Sleepwalk with Me

    For most aspiring comedians there's nothing particularly funny about being broke and trying to make it on the stand-up scene.

    April 10, 2013, 5:30 am

  • REVIEW: Trance

    After winning an Oscar for the colourful crowd-pleaser Slumdog Millionaire then following up with true-life adventure 127 Hours, English director Danny Boyle returns to his disreputable origins with the showy, shamelessly entertaining genre picture, Trance.

    April 9, 2013, 8:00 am

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