Incredibly convoluted but surprisingly entertaining buddy action comedy starring Mark Wahlberg and Denzel Washington as undercover agents from rival agencies, both out to crack a drug cartel who are initially unaware that the other is also undercover. Baltasar Kormakur keeps things fast and breezy, while the tone is gleefully bloody and bawdy in a throwback […] Read more »
The year is 2040 and the world’s economic wealth has shifted to Asia. After a series of economic catastrophes, Europe and North America are wastelands full of desperate people, eking out an existence doing the dangerous, poorly paid jobs no-one in Asia wants to do anymore. This is the premise for Ghosts With Shit Jobs, […] Read more »
The third installment in Richard Linklater's series of films examining the evolving relationship between Jesse and Celine proves to be the best yeat, and one of the year's most accomplished films. Read more »
Richard Linklater and his stars/co-writers Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy revisit Jesse and Celine once more in the third installment of their ever-improving Before franchise. It is fair to say that very few people were even aware of this film’s existence before it was announced as part of the Sundance line-up at the beginning of […] Read more »
Set nine years after the events in Vienna, Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) meet again in Paris, where Jesse is giving a reading from his new novel – based in large part on their encounter from the first film. While this is the first time they have met or spoken since, they quickly […] Read more »
Jack Black plays the semi talented guitarist Dewey Finn in this light-hearted 2003 comedy. Largely reprising his performance as Barry, the socially dysfunctional rock music obsessive from High Fidelity, Black is at his best as Finn, dumped from his band, fakes being a teacher and leads a group of unsuspecting students (including Miranda Cosgrove from […] Read more »
I sincerely believe that one day Michael Bay will make a masterpiece. To-date I still believe that The Rock is his best film. I know that Bad Boys 2 has lots of fans, but for me it grows too long and unwieldy for its own good. The Rock works because it has smart script, talented […] Read more »
One of the top tier John Hughes efforts that somehow passed me by until now. Molly Ringwald plays Samantha, and it’s her sixteenth birthday – but her entire family seems to have forgotten. She proceeds to have the worst day imaginable, no thanks to her sister getting married, the weird antics of exchange student Long […] Read more »
This late colour entry from Federico Fellini sees Marcello Mastroianni play a philandering womaniser who follows hs latest conquest off a train and into a dreamworld populated solely by women. What at first seems like the ultimate indulgent fantasy quickly turns against him and he is eventually brought to trial to answer for his perceived […] Read more »
After a troubling daliance in stoner comedy, David Gordon Green returns to the more independent, thoughtful material on which he made his name. Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch play maintenance workers in the burnt-out woodlands of Texas. Based on the Icelandic film, Either Way, this comedic drama employs plenty of improvisation from its two leads […] Read more »
Originally marketed under the name Malavita, The Family sees Robert De Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer as the parents of the Manzoni family, hiding in France under assumed names (Blake being the latest), under the watchful eye of Tommy Lee Jones and the FBI witness protection programme. One assumes The Family is meant to be a […] Read more »
When her grandfather dies, 15-year-old Wei Wei (Xu Jiao) inherits his circus, particularly their star attraction: a baseball-playing gorilla, Ling Ling. Unfortunately, she also inherits his huge gambling debts and is only able to fend off the gangsters intent on taking over the circus, by signing Ling Ling over to a Korean baseball team. After […] Read more »
Roland Emmerich’s take on the “Die Hard in the White House” action set-up that was visited earlier this year in Antoine Fuqua’s Olympus Has Fallen, is a far bigger, louder and more ludicrous affair. Channing Tatum plays the wannabe Secret Service agent who finds himself – along with his tech-savvy teenage daughter – trapped in […] Read more »
An undisputed classic of American Silent Cinema and one of the very best examples of physical comedy committed to screen, Safety Last! remains the best-known film of Harold Lloyd, despite the fact he made many more than his contemporaries Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Essentially the story of a simple country boy looking for love […] Read more »
Huge disappointment after the surprisingly witty original. Here, the film seems completely disinterested in its characters, so ripe with nuance and subversion, and is instead content simply to gross out its audience with a parade of low brow humour, casual mysogyny and unimaginative action. Not even the addition of an enthusiastic Jim Carrey – in […] Read more »
It was only while watching this film that I came to the realisation that I had never seen a film directed by Joe Swanberg before now. I was familiar with his work and had seen him act in a number of fellow Mumblecore filmmakers’ works, but this was to be my first encounter with un […] Read more »
Overlong but consistently funny, Paul Feig follows up the hugely successful Bridesmaids with another female-centric comedy, this time turning Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy into action heroes. The plot is cliched, rambling and largely inconsequential, but the film gets by on strong chemistry between the two leads and the fact that Sandra Bullock, who is […] Read more »
There’s been a trend, in recent years, to play the Zombie Apocalypse for laughs. While Shaun Of The Dead and Go Goa Gone do this well, the pick of the bunch, for me, is this smart and original 2009 comedy Zombieland, directed by Ruben Fleischer. Originally conceived as a TV Show, Zombieland was Fleischer’s first […] Read more »
Alexa Vega Daryl Sabara play Carmen and Juni Cortez, the children of retired spies Gregorio (Antonio Banderas) and Ingrid (Carla Gugino) in the film that launched a successful four-part franchise and gave us the film debut of Danny Trejo’s Machete character, who went on to appear in Grindhouse and two subsequent films, Machete and Machete […] Read more »
Pasolini’s films are challenging but I like to challenge myself from time to time, and his body of work has become one of my go-to selections when I’m looking to push myself outside of my comfort zone. That said, his adaptation of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales is probably the most fun and unreservedly entertaining […] Read more »