The Accountant Movie Review
Affleck plays Christian Wolff, an autistic certified public accountant that also moonlights as an assassin. Wolff’s inability to really connect with other human beings adds a chilling reality to his actions and Affleck’s stoic portrayal feels accurate. Even the love angle is suitably underplayed.
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The film’s structure mixes enough back-story to flush out Wolff’s beginnings but not so much as to rob the film of its forward momentum. It builds to a satisfying climax while ...
Inferno Movie Review
The latest edition skips the third Brown book, The Lost Symbol and drops Harvard University professor Robert Langdon (Hanks) into the usual world of intrigue. Conspiracies play a more reduced role this time and the film plays out with more action and less intrigue. The action is largely set in Venice, which is an excellent choice as it’s one of the world’s most unique looking cities.
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The casting is not the film’s strongest suit as Hanks and lead actress Felicity Jones as his ...
The Light Between Oceans Competition
In the years following World War I, lighthouse keeper Tom Sherbourne and his wife Isabel begin their life together on a remote island off the coast of Western Australia. As the only inhabitants of Janus Rock, the couple live a quiet life, blissfully in love and sheltered from the rest of the world. Then one day, a mysterious rowboat washes ashore carrying a dead man and a crying baby girl. Reeling from a recent loss, Tom and Isabel decide to raise the child as their own, setting off a chain ...
Deepwater Horizon Movie Review
Mark Wahlberg and Kurt Russell are the heroes of the piece as their salt of the earth characters rise to the occasion and help to prevent a more serious loss of life through selfless heroism. The action is suitably claustrophobic as the isolation of the out-to-sea oil platform plays into the disaster.
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Berg’s decision to focus on the accident on the oil rig and reduce the ecological disaster that was cased by the oil leak to a small footnote at the end of the film robs the experie...
Hacksaw Ridge Competition
Hacksaw Ridge is the extraordinary true story of Desmond Doss [Andrew Garfield] who, in Okinawa during the bloodiest battle of WWII, saved 75 men without firing or carrying a gun.
He was the only American soldier in WWII to fight on the front lines without a weapon, as he believed that while the war was justified, killing was nevertheless wrong. As an army medic, he single-handedly evacuated the wounded from behind enemy lines, braved fire while tending to soldiers and was wounded by a ...
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children Movie Review
Unafraid to unsettle his young target audience (if only just a bit), Burton keeps the creepiness quotient on a low boil while interspersing the proceedings with enough lightness to keep things on the sweet dreams side of nightmares. My 9 year-old was fine with it and, indeed, loved it. Think Coraline-level macabre but perhaps a touch more grisly.
It pays to keep your wits about you in order to follow the film's mild time-bending eccentricities but, if you keep up, it's not hard to ...
Boys in the Trees Competition
It’s Halloween 1997 - the last night of high school for Corey, Jango and their skater gang, The Gromits. Childhood is over and adult life beckons. But for Corey, his past has some unfinished business. When he encounters Jonah, a former childhood friend but now victimised by Jango’s cruel streak, Corey takes pity on him and agrees to walk him home for old time’s sake.
What starts off as a normal walk through empty suburban streets descends into something darker and magical as they ...
Snowden Movie Review
Snowden was a young and prodigious computer geek that got involved in the US government network of spies and its American citizen electronic scrutiny. He got pulled in, chewed up and spit out when the morality of the domestic spying regime overwhelmed him. He ended up paying a very heavy price for his ethics.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt is outstanding as Snowden and it’s almost eerie how close his portrayal comes to the real person (especially brought to light in the film’s coda where the ...
Julieta Competition
Julieta lives in Madrid with her daughter Antía. They both suffer in silence over the loss of Xoan, Antía’s father and Julieta’s husband. But at times grief doesn’t bring people closer, it drives them apart.
When Antía turns eighteen she abandons her mother, without a word of explanation. Julieta looks for her in every possible way, but all she discovers is how little she knows of her daughter.
Julieta talks about the mother’s struggle to survive uncertainty. It also talks ...
Spin Out Movie Review
With his latest project, he has developed a film that feels nostalgic and very sentimental. It’s simplistic to the point of seeming more a wish of the present than an accurate assessment. It delivers very few surprises but instead relies on the innate charms of its cast.
Australian cast members Xavier Samuel, Morgan Griffin, Travis Jeffery and Lincoln Lewis do their best to bring life to a very predictable script. Their chemistry together adds a much needed charm and interest to the ...
