This film has more than a few thrilling moments. It caused my friend to throw her hands over her eyes and gasp, numerous times. I kept looking, but will admit to a few gasps too. Academy Award winning René Zellweger, who plays Emily Jenkins, a caring and devoted social worker, is determined to prove that […]
What does a doting, yet also distraught mother do, when she sees her only son hell-bent on a dissolute and debilitating life of debauchery? Arising from slumbers late, hung over and surly, Chéri, (played by Rupert Friend) behaves like a lot of 19 year olds who are spoiled rotten and maternally (financially) dependant he is
Making stories about celebrities who mess up their lives has become a kind of cottage industry these days. Tabloid magazines have thrived on it for years. The E! True Hollywood Story and Behind the Music have extended celeb-thrashing to TV. Finally the big screen has embraced such tales, but Auto Focus proves, once again, there’s
The mythology of Howard Hughes is quite possibly bigger than the man could ever live up to. Already the subject of a handful of movies and over 100 books, the particulars of the Hughes legend are widely known. But leave it to Martin Scorsese to spin the eccentric’s life into a more coherent if sprawling
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
