Reviews

Dreamworks takes the “I want to be a Kung Fu master – but I’m a Panda” formula and replaces it with: “I want to be a race car – but I’m a snail.” The result is a “no dream’s too big, no dreamer too small” tale that, whilst it ain’t up to Disney/Pixar standards, borrows […]

Banished to HBO in its native America for being “too gay”, Steven Soderbergh’s Liberace tell-all is actually scrupulously careful not to offend anyone: like Boogie Nights making nice. Based on the memoirs of Scott Thorson, the late pianist’s embittered ex-lover from 1977-1982, it’s a relatively sunny affair, swept along by charismatic performances from Damon and Douglas, two […]

Fans of Michel Gondry bummed at his troubled excursion into big-budget studio filmmaking with The Green Hornet should be pleased to know that Mood Indigo, his adaptation of Renaissance Frenchman Boris Vian’s 1947 novel L’ecume des jours, is a spritely restoration of his ol’ recognisably quirky and inventive self from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Science of Sleep. His […]

After the disappointment of Percy Jackson & the Lightning Thief, Diary of a Wimpy Kid director Thor Freudenthal delivers a much-improved rendering of Rick Riordan’s books. This time the teen demigods must save a magic tree at Hogwarts – er, Camp Half-Blood – by undertaking the perilous journey to the titular Sea of Monsters (aka The Bermuda Triangle) […]

Not intent on converting any naysayers, 1D3D could have easily dumped some badly edited concert footage together onto their supposedly none-the-wiser demographic, but This is Us shows a wholehearted respect for its audience with this cinematic performance-biopic splicer. Morgan Spurlock, documentarian fave amongst many cine-hipster circles, admirably spruces up the concert experience with some post-production love as background graphics […]

Ron Howard’s Rush is an exuberant, diverting dramatisation of the legendary rivalry between Formula One racers James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) and Niki Lauda (Daniel Brühl) over the course of the fateful Grand Prix season of 1976. Its combo of hair-raising behind-the-wheel action, heated off-track controversies and stormy relationship soap is hardly earth-shattering stuff, but Howard and writer […]

The very things that make The Best Offer such a sublime delight are also the same things that would cripple its narrative if closely scrutinised. This Hitchcock homage, written and directed by Giuseppe Tornatore (of Cinema Paradiso fame), is a creepy, weird, captivating, endearingly awkward concoction, a precious thing of gimmicky preposterousness that one can imagine Brian De Palma […]

Taking its cue from the Grimm brothers’ fairytales – but not, bizarrely, The Artist which was made at the same time – Spanish writer/director Pablo Berger’s Oscar-nominated Snow White adaptation announces its self-importance from the off. It’s silent, shot in black-and-white and extraordinarily expensive-looking, with the edges of the frame mimicking the boxy aspect ratio of the 1920s era. […]

With Riddick, Vin Diesel & David Twohy have taken their character ‘back to his roots’, which means casting aside the mythology that polluted Chronicles, and making something a lot closer to his first go-round, Pitch Black. That film was a lean sci-fi thriller that riffed on Aliens and cast Riddick as a villain of sorts, who eventually emerged as an […]

For a film that’s based on a novel published well over a century ago, What Maisie Knew feels remarkably modern. But then Henry James had a knack for slicing through to reality, and what could be more depressingly timeless than parents behaving badly? At first glance, gorgeous young Maisie has a charmed life. She lives in a […]

Shakespeare as you’ve never seen it before sees the Montagues and Capulets as white-trash Kiwi families feuding in a trailer park (a “boganised” Waipu camp ground). It’s also the musical version, a mad pop, hip-hop and rock opera that will defy expectation, with weird and wonderful art direction, plenty of visual gags – including a […]

On first impression, 96 minutes may seem like a long time to spend watching a film about a 90-year-old who loves her garden, but Sister Loyola Galvin has a lifetime of experience and an abundant depth of character that shine through in this ever-intimate, at times beautiful-looking documentary. And as you may be suspecting, Gardening with […]

There’s a lot to cover in Salinger, seeing as its reclusive subject is one of the most talked-about authors of the 20th Century. Dense, and possibly treating the author with too much reverence, Shane Salerno’s doco is at times also over-wrought, but luckily his subject is so damn intriguing that he carries Salinger through its most […]

Wunderkinder (German for ‘child prodigy’) is a fictional tale of childhood friendship put to the test by the cruelty of an adult world bent on destruction. Set in the Ukraine of the early 1940s, Hanna (Mathilda Adamik) a young German girl, befriends two Russian Jews – gifted child-violinist, Abrascha (Elin Kolev), and his piano-playing friend, […]

With its Die Hard-in-the-White-House premise already taken out in a pre-emptive strike by Olympus Has Fallen earlier this year, White House Down suddenly had to do more than just rely on its high concept. That’s something it almost sorta does, thanks in part to director Roland Emmerich (Independence Day) – who’s never met an outlandish blockbuster idea he and a […]

Occupying the same space as other laughable, misguided Hollywood attempts at “timely”, “technologically relevant” cyber-thrillers like The Net and Firewall, Robert Luketic’s Paranoia answers the question nobody was asking: what if the director of Legally Blonde remade The Conversation? Just as generic and bland as its title would imply, this unexciting corporate espionage thriller plods along with exposition-clogged, techno-babble dialogue and standard issue […]

My high-school English teacher saw my literary quirks as something that needed to be nurtured, not amended – his intrigue into my characteristic idiosyncrasies being remarkably similar to those portrayed in Francois Ozon’s In the House. However, my teacher wasn’t a crotchety has-been/never-was and I certainly didn’t have any vivid desire to bang my best mate’s […]