Tim Burton’s first two Batman films were all about this nerd auteur playing with a gigantic train set, so even though the stories were threadbare and superficial, at least Burton brought a highly stylized pop Gothic look. Jack Nicholson hammed it up nicely as the Joker and Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman was an unforgettably sexy femme […]
The year was 1992 and the movie was Batman Returns. It marked the end of the Batman franchise as a series of good movies. It was, friends, the last great Batman. Gotham was dark and so was the script. Darkly comic, darkly romantic, and darkly dramatic. This tale told of Michael Keaton as Batman in
Batman’s reins have been turned over from director Tim Burton (now producing) to Joel Schumacher, from lead Michael Keaton to Val Kilmer, and from an old, baroque Gotham to a heavily stylized, kiddie pop city. A lot can be said for the idea that the setting of a picture thoroughly controls its tone. What we
Timing is everything for a movie’s success, and Basic Instinct had it in 1992, released years before the internet and the sophisticated world of satellite and cable television offered viewers a masturbatory buffet for nominal cost. Fourteen years ago, seeing Sharon Stone uncross her legs or frolic in the nude was a big deal on
Vaughn plays Ronny, the co-owner of an engine design firm, who can’t bring himself to tell best friend and business partner, Nick (Kevin James), that his wife, Geneva (Wyona Ryder), has been cheating on him. The two friends are shaping to sell an electric engine system to Dodge Motors that mimics the sounds and vibrations
Rachel McAdams plays Becky, a workaholic producer who as a child idolised the hard-hitting style of journalist Mike Pomeroy (Harrison Ford, who seems to have been asked to do a parody of his infamously grumpy public persona), so when she grew up she naturally dreamed of running the Today Show! Unexpectedly sacked from her present
Did we really need another one of these? The original Meet the Parents was strong stuff, basing its story in the realm of reality and then good-naturedly breezing through the jokes. Meet the Fockers was everything the first film wasn’t, labouring for laughs at every boob joke. In Meet the Parents Little Fockers, it’s less
If you watched Play Dirty even if you just noted the title and the fact that it’s a war picture you’d probably have a fairly good chance of pinpointing the year in which it was made. This is Vietnam-era filmmaking at its most ironically pointed. There are no heroes in Play Dirty. One character, Michael
Gellar plays the titular character, a young New York-based corporate jockey who, in the film’s opening scenes, decides to take her own life by overdosing on sleeping pills. Why she does this is never specifically explained, but screenwriters Roberta Hanley and Larry Gross provide a couple of hooks that enable us identify with Veronika’s need
Travel to the cinema recently? Then you’d be forgiven for thinking the projectionist had some sort of Natalie Portman fetish. If the American actress wasn’t in the film you paid to see, she would have at least been in 80 per cent of the coming attractions. In that sense, No Strings Attached performs an important
