Cheri Movie Review
Indeed all the familiar parameters are in place: unrequited love, the scheming matronly type (Kathy Bates standing in for Glenn Close), the virginal victim, well-camouflaged comments aimed at the jugular, bustles and opulent architecture. But Cheri begs the question… Where’s the flesh and blood?
Set in 1906, Cheri (Rupert Friend) is a handsome, petulant playboy already tainted by too much of the good life. After accepting a seductive invitation from family friend and former courtesan ...
Iron Man 3 Movie Review
The first film worked so well at creating Iron Man’s back-story and showed how well certain rock music can lift a film’s energy just by their mere presence. The second film squandered most of that good will with a poor choice of casting and weak story. Welcome round three and in the now almost obligatory for films of this type, 3D format.
Try as the film does for some real surprise story moments and to flush out the main characters lives, it really lets the side down but as an ...
Iron Man 2 Movie Review
Iron Man 2 is certainly bigger, with an obviously enlarged budget, the film is packed with more expensive looking special effects and even more gratuitous over the top action. The film’s final duke-out is magnified as well with the addition of a very large number of baddies and an overabundance of explosive effects. The story also gets ramped up as we meet Tony Stark’s father (in flashback home movies) and get some welcome insight into his childhood.
Some of the relationships from ...
Thor: The Dark World Movie Review
Thor: The Dark World is not as interesting as its predecessor and that film was by no means the best of The Avengers tie-in prequels. From frost giants in the first film to dark elves here, the villains are getting smaller and so is the scope of the films. This is a stock action CGI fantasy where nothing new is learnt about any of the characters; it's merely goodies versus baddies, albeit presented in a slick and entertaining package. The 3D presentation makes little use of depth and is ...
Thor Movie Review
Thor (the movie version) is played by Australian actor Chris Hemsworth and he has come a long way from his days on Home And Away. He now has the pre-requisite comic book superhero physique and has muscles on top of muscles. The rest of the cast features some surprisingly well-established A-list thespians. The list includes Natalie Portman, Stellan Skarsgård and Anthony Hopkins. Wait a minute on that last selection; with some of Hopkins’ recent paycheck films he might be in danger of ...
Captain America: The Winter Soldier Movie Review
Captain America is an old world hero transplanted into a modern age and this made for some fun exchanges in the context of The Avengers but can this be sustained in a film all his own? The result, The Winter Soldier is mixed bag of successes and well, not quite failures, but certainly non-successes.
The film features a well-written, intricate story with broad elements of Minority Report and Robocop and it's nice to see how these components weave together through the course of the film. ...
The Avengers Movie Review
Compared to that other great superhero ensemble flick (no, not Fantastic Four!), Bryan Singer's X-Men, The Avengers is the kitschy one of the two but it is no less a film. Whedon shows that he knows how to do kitsch without descending into a tired, boring, groan-inducing cliché (like Fantastic Four). Of course Whedonphiles have known this for many years and now the rest of the world will know it.
The primary difficulty in an ensemble film such as this is making sure that each character ...
Gangster Squad Movie Review
The story line mainly focuses on real-life gangster Mickey Cohen and the extremes the authorities back in the day used to bring him down. Cohen’s real life story makes for fascinating reading but the movie only taps into a fraction of that but the parts they do use succeed in making Penn as Cohen one of the most over the top villains in screen history. He chews up and spits out so many gangster clichés, it become quite hilarious.
The original cut of the film was modified after the ...
The Expendables Movie Review
Which is why it is especially perplexing that The Expendables has so many talky bits in it and lengthy ones at that. Do we really care about Jason Statham's endless diatribes on his lucklessness in love? Um… no. Do we care about how Randy Couture got his cauliflower ears? Hmmm… not really. Do we want more shooty bits and explosions? Oh, yes please!
Sly Stallone's new flick is the epitome of WYSIWYG movie making, what you see is definitely what you get. With an all-star gym-jockey ...
Fast Five Movie Review
For although the F&F films are well known for their dubious (albeit spectacularly exciting) car play, the opening scene in this episode stretches implausibility to a level which is hard to swallow even for these movies. It pays to only follow this film in the broadest of strokes as the details rarely add up.
The tagline from the previous film – ‘new model, original parts’ - is even truer this time around as Fast Five nicely consolidates all the entries to date by drawing ...
