When underground director Ryuhei Kitamura announced that he’d be making Azumi, his first film inside the Japanese studio system after a successful run of independent films (Versus, Aragami), fans may have had just cause to fear. Not only was he joining the mainstream machine, but he was also directing for the first time a script […]
James Cameron’s name is plastered all over the advertising material for Sanctum (he acted as executive producer) but precious few of the filmmaker’s signature touches have made it into this Australian adventure thriller. There’s no sci-fi, no strong female characters, and little in the way of dependable dialogue. Even the script could have done with
There’s been a fair bit of discussion as to whether or not True Grit is a remake. It might seem a question of semantics, but you can understand the confusion: technically speaking, True Grit is the second literary adaptation of Charles Portis’s novel of the same name and bears no relation to the original 1969
You’ll lose your lunch about a half hour into The Killing of Angel Street. The film is stamped in its opening credits as a work of fiction, with any resemblance to real characters being purely coincidental, so when someone mentions the disappearance of an anti-development campaigner named Juanita Nielsen, the film suddenly feels laughably disingenuous.
Black Swan is like a conjurer’s trick. It dances in front of you, it moves and shakes, offers distractions and throws up red herrings. And it’s so effective that when all is said and done you’re not really sure what happened. All you know is that, at some point, you’ve been deceived. Not that Black
Consider a parallel world at the dawn of the new millennium. Unemployment is rampant, national morale is low and the country’s youth are unruly and dangerous. The government’s solution: Banish one school class per year to a deserted island and force them to kill each other. Three days, no rules, one winner. If you’ve never
Just when you thought the mockumentary had mocked everything worth mocking, here comes a new gem of the genre that will have you rolling in the aisles once again. Up for skewering this time around is the dog show, as Best in Show takes the absolutely inane shenanigans of dog breeders and handlers, impaling their
With preternatural good looks, a Spice Girl for a wife, and an uncanny ability to kick a soccer ball and make it land wherever he wants, David Beckham is one of the biggest stars of British sports. The soccer player was nice enough to lend his name to Bend It Like Beckham, a spirited, good-natured
The main problem with making a sequel to the original Apes was that Charlton Heston didn’t want to put the loincloth back on to keep the struggle going against those damn, dirty apes. So Richard Zanuck, the producer of the original Apes, asked Heston personally to return to the role as some kind of karmic
When is somebody going to scare the shit out of us again? Will the day arrive when I can watch a movie with the same frightened, uneasy feeling I get when I walk through my darkened hallway at midnight? These questions zoom into mind after watching David Twohy’s Below, the latest in a line of
