SOMEWHERE - I got you under my skin

I thought I was going to hate SOMEWHERE. In fact, I almost wanted to hate it. I had even crafted the first line of this review. "It must be possible to create a movie about boredom and alienation that is not itself boring and alienating." And as the curtain lifted on Sofia Coppola's latest movie, I thought I was going to have to walk out. For here we had a guy driving round a dirt track in a Ferrari...

BURLESQUE - nonsense

BURLESQUE is a Hollywood song-and-dance movie that exists entirely as a vehicle for Christina Aguilera and consists entirely as a collage of cinematic clichés, over-singing and over-acting. Debut writer-director Steve Antin should be ashamed to have so blatantly tried to rip off the style of the non-pareil musical, CABARET, harnessing Fosse's dance-steps to a plot so vacuous as to make a barbie doll...

CATFISH - "The REAL Facebook movie"

Nev Schulman meets Megan Faccio on the internet. She writes him songs, he sends her compliments. They seem to "connect". Pretty soon the texting turns to sexting. Nev starts to talk about what it would mean to make a relationship work with someone who lives out of state. The infatuation goes beyond Megan. Nev is friends with her family and her friends. He thinks they're all pretty awesome. But somehow, while he speaks to them on the phone, they never...

THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: THE VOYAGE OF THE DAWN TREADER

THE VOYAGE OF THE DAWN TREADER is the third installment of the Narnia franchise, based on the children's fantasy novels and Christian apologia by C.S.Lewis. It comes to our screen after a troubled birth. After the disappointing box office on PRINCE CASPIAN, Disney pulled out of funding, having tried unsuccessfully to restrict the budget to $100m. And presumably in order to boost sales, Walden Media retrofitted the movie with 3D, resulting in a...

Random DVD Round-Up 8 - WAR INC.

WAR INC. is a lo-fi but high concept political satire set in a fictional post-Soviet Islamic republic. Focussing on the key differentiator of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the country isn't occupied by the US Army but by a Blackwater style private mercenary organisation run by a Cheney like former US Veep (Dan Aykroyd). He hires John Cusack's assassin to kill a Middle Eastern oil minister in...

Random DVD Round-up 7 - SUBURBAN MAYHEM

Like an Australian mash-up of TO DIE FOR and NATURAL BORN KILLERS, Aussie director Paul Goldman's (THE NIGHT WE CALLED IT A DAY) SUBURBAN MAYHEM is a lot of fun up until the point where, well, it isn't. The star of the show is Emma Barclay's Kat - a slutty media-whore intent on raising the cash to get her murderous brother a retrial, and willing to manipulate meat-heads into off'ing anyone who gets in her way. The first half of the flick is carried...

Random DVD Round-Up 6 - THE PUFFY CHAIR

So I should've written up THE PUFFY CHAIR years ago, but looking back at 2010, and realising that CYRUS was the movie I loved the most, prompted me to finally get round to doing it. That and being snowed in, wondering whether my Christmas vacation was going to be cancelled. It's amazing how much crap you get round to doing - filing your pay-cheques, organising your sock drawer (literally), and writing...

Late, late review - HEART, BEATING IN THE DARK/YAMIUTSU SHINZO (2005)

With HEART, BEATING IN THE DARK, Japanese director Shunichi Nagasaki remakes and reimagines his own 1982 movie of the same name. Filmed on both 35mm and Super-8 the movie attempts to recreate the punk energy and moral ambiguity of the original tale of a murderous couple on the run from their own consciences. That film was short (seventy minutes), grimy, claustrophobic and bleak. The remake is about...

Random DVD Round-Up 5 - HOT TUB TIME MACHINE

HOT TUB TIME MACHINE really isn't as funny as it should be given it's awesome title. It's like the SNAKES ON A PLANE of comedy. The conceit is that a bunch of schlubby frustrated middle-aged friends go back to the ski resort where they had an awesome batchelor ski-trip. They drink too much, wind up naked in the hot tub, and somehow get zapped back in time to the original holiday. Cue lots of early 80s nostalgia - images of Ronald Reagan and ALF...

Random DVD Round-Up 4 - EDIE & THEA: A VERY LONG ENGAGEMENT

Edie and Thea are two young women who came to New York in the 1950s and found love. They shared their lives together, became engaged, travelled, loved, grew old, marched for gay rights, and suffered from homophobia. Eventually, with Thea in a wheelchair, dying, and Edie a still beautiful 80 year old, they got married. Susan Muska and Greta Olafsdottir (THE BRANDON TEENA STORY, later fictionalised...

Random DVD Round-Up 3 - THE LOTTERY

THE LOTTERY is a deeply partisan piece of documentary film-making, advancing the case of publicly funded but privately managed Charter Schools over the old established Zone schools. The argument is advanced with a dazzling array of statistics quoted on screen, calm and dignified talking heads, and seemingly evangelical teachers and parents. The basic thesis is that the monopolistic provision of...

Random DVD Round-Up 2 - HEARTBREAKER

French TV director Pascal Chaumeil makes his big-screen debut with the commercial hit, HEARTBREAKER. It's a whimsical romantic-comedy starring Romain Duris (THE BEAT MY HEART SKIPPED) and Vanessa Paradis (er...Chanel ads?). Penned by Laurent Zeitoun, Jeremy Doner and Yohan Gromb, the plot is driven by a conceit that is so palpably stupid that the film never really recovers from it. Duris plays Alex...

Random DVD round-up 1 - LEAVING

Kristin Scott Thomas has a cool hard beauty that has seen her cast in many a film as, well, a cool hard beauty - emotionally repressed and stolidly dutiful. How wonderful then to see her madly, wide-smilingly in love - almost fey. In Catherine Corsini's LEAVING, Scott Thomas plays Suzanne, a middle-aged middle-class woman married to a financially successful medic and living in a beautiful house....

Golden Globes nominations in full...

BEST PICTURE – DRAMA: The King's Speech; The Social Network; Black Swan; The Fighter; Inception. All fine with me except The King's Speech which is clearly a nostalgia choice and comes on the back of Colin Firth catching everyone's eye last year. Black Swan should win. The Social Network might.BEST PICTURE - MUSICAL OR COMEDY: Alice in Wonderland; Burlesque; The Kids Are Alright; Red; The Tourist....

THE TOURIST - in the words of the great Ian Dury, what a waste

THE TOURIST is that dirty of dirtiest of Hollywood words, a "troubled" film. This is Hollywood code for a project that has become toxic; stuck in pre-production; riddled with "creative differences"; lead actors dropping out; directors hired, fired, and hired again; and writing credits expanded by the desperate attempts of over-paid script-doctors to hammer some shape and vision back into the bulbous...

Preview - THE NEXT THREE DAYS

THE NEXT THREE DAYS is a faithful remake of Fred Cafave's French thriller, POUR ELLE / ANYTHING FOR HER. It has been remade by the American writer/director Paul Haggis, famous for scripts and films that are, to my mind, over-long, over-elaborate, over-technical and lacking in real emotion. Unfortunately, THE NEXT THREE DAYS is no exception. Russell Crowe stars as a schlubby loser who loves his wife...

TRON: LEGACY 3D - Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

TRON: LEGACY is the much anticipated sequel to the iconic, pioneering 1982 sci-fi flick that took us inside the computer for the very first time. It is faithful to the original, while at the same time taking full advantage of new technologies, and while I am sure fan-boys will be happy, as a complete newbie, I found it exciting, evocative and literally wonderful. However, as I'll go on to explain,...

Late review - London Film Fest 2010 - HORS LA LOI / OUTSIDE THE LAW

This review is brought to you by guest reviewer, Alex:Director Rachid Bouchareb’s story of a family of Algerian immigrants to France and their lives from 1945 to 1962 has been likened to “The Godfather” or “Once Upon A Time in America”. Like the excellent “La Haine” which touched on the same themes, the movie provoked protests and high security when it played the Cannes film festival and right-wing...

TRON (1982) - Avatar

We all have movies we are obsessed with as children. For me, it was STAR WARS. Star Wars the movies, the toys, the computer games, the novels...TRON passed me by. Not so for a generous of incipient sci-fi freaks and computer nerds, not to mention Daft Punk. For those kids, TRON the movie and even more so, TRON the arcade game, are nostalgia-inducing, iconic, pop-cultural artefacts. So, the other...

FULL REVIEW OF TRON LEGACY 3D WILL BE POSTED HERE AT 10 PM ON SUNDAY 5th DECEMBER

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MONSTERS - ceci n'est pas un horror flick

MONSTERS is a movie that has been much-hyped as a totem for how movie-making has become democratised by cheap digital cameras and editing packages. The young British director Gareth Edwards has proved that a talented visual effects artist can create a horror movie that looks every bit as slick and full of special effects as the largest Hollywood studio with a few digital cameras and an editing package...