Category: Film
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I was an enormous fan of Loan Scherfig’s 2009 picture An Education. It captured a spirit of charming optimism that is rarely seen in British films these days. Her big-screen adaptation of David Nicholl’s bestselling novel One Day does have a certain degree of charming optimism, but is sadly far from the masterpiece-standard reached with…
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The first entry in Swedish author Steig Larsson’s best-selling Millennium trilogy became a surprise big-screen hit. The film, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, directed by Niels Arden Oplev, was a near-perfect adaptation of Larsson’s novel. Chilling, reckless and relentlessly compelling, it was a foreign-language film for a mainstream audience, earning a place in multiplexes that…
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Kirk Jones’s remake of 1990 Italian drama Stanno Tutti Bene received a less-than-enthusiastic response from some critics when it was released last year, but I found it an enjoyable, involving and at times moving experience, with a beautifully restrained performance at its core from one of the industry’s best actors. Robert De Niro plays widower Frank,…
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Game of Death is one of the latest releases from Stage 6 Films, Sony’s B-movie department that turns out cheap trash at an incredible rate, producing up to 15 features per year. This awful straight-to-DVD dud sums up the quality of most of their output. Wesley Snipes plays a special ops agent, charged with the…
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Set in the American depression of the 1930s, this big-screen adaptation of Sara Gruen’s best-selling novel may be sumptuously filmed, but unfortunately it is yet another example of a film that is gorgeous to look at but ultimately dead from within. The film is bookended by an old man called Jacob telling the story of…
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Richard Ayoade jumps into his directorial debut with a bit too much enthusiasm, making Submarine a little hard to handle.
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Rapunzel is brought back to life by Disney, in a cheesy but thoroughly enjoyable way.
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Derivative, tedious and rather trying, this low-budget sci-fi road movie is far from the masterpiece some have claimed it to be. Heralded as an extraordinary achievement in production (which is, for the most part, a fair assessment), the film relies on beautiful photography and vague menacing moments to keep the audience captivated. This didn’t work…
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Wonderful cinematography and Zac Efron’s half-decent performance can’t save this boring story.
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Terrence Malick’s latest production mixes A-list stars and a stuttering storyline to create an audience-dividing phenomenon.
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The issue of child sex abuse is handled carefully and commendably in John Patrick Shanley’s 2009 drama.
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Because Hollywood is so desperate to con people into thinking 3D entertainment is the best thing since sliced bread, studios are re-releasing their back catalogues in digital three-dimensional versions. Here we have a strange animated film from 2009, Henry Selick’s Coraline. Dakota Fanning voices the annoying title character in this muddled and unpleasant fantasy adventure.…
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While not as good as some of Pixar’s finest works, The Incredibles is still widely enjoyable and entertaining.
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It’s hard to see whether this inept and boring thriller is an affectionate throwback to old damsel-in-distress pictures of long ago, or just another conventional, cruelly exploitative piece of Hollywood trash. Actually, although set in Brooklyn, The Resident happens to be a British film made by the newly rebooted horror studio Hammer; and while it’s…