During my youth I spent many hours next door with the neighbor boy. Not just for having fun or horsing around, but also because in their veranda there was a disused closet with sliding doors where you could always find some old comics lying around. I suppose these were from the older brother who was…
Castaway in space? That one line essentially sums up the plot of this sci-fi drama that heralds a return to form for director Ridley Scott (Alien, Blade Runner, The Duellists, etc). Not long after playing an astronaut stranded on an inhospitable planet in the bloated Interstellar, Matt Damon returns as an astronaut stranded in space on…
There have been many film versions of Shakespeare’s bloodiest and most cinematic play, from Orson Welles’ idiosyncratic 1948 version through to Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood in 1961, which reinvented the play as a samurai drama. More recently Australian director Geoffrey Wright (Romper Stomper) gave us a more contemporary take on the play, setting the…
Recently we saw Eden, Mia Hansen-Love’s drama following an aspiring young DJ pursuing success and tracing the rise of Daft Punk and the development of garage dance music in France, which left me a little cold. This low budget feature from America also looks at an aspiring DJ who is aiming to make a name…
Is it a plane? Is it a bird? Is it Superman? No, it’s just an ordinary guy named Scott Lang (Rudd Paul) who stole from some millionaires in a digital, Robin Hood-like way in the past and who can transform into a superhero the size of an ant by using a high-tech suit. This suit…
Gustave Flaubert’s 1865 brooding and bittersweet tragedy about a 19th century self destructive woman and her tragic fall from grace has been filmed many times. There was even a recent contemporary take on the character with the recent French film Gemma Bovary. And Woody Allen used Flaubert’s famous character as the template for his Blue…
Woman in Gold is a wonderful and sometimes touching film. Not because of the topic as this was already highlighted in The Monuments Men, but because of the brilliant rendition Helen Mirren is showing here. A role that suits her perfectly. A distinguished elderly lady who’s a descendant of a wealthy Jewish family and who…
Risque business? Unfunny business? Long gone are the days when Vince Vaughn used to make energetic and enjoyable comedies. But recently the aggressive motor mouthed comic actor has recently made a number of largely unfunny, mediocre and embarrassingly dull comedies of late, with films like The Dilemma, Fred Claus, The Watch and Delivery Man to…
This crime drama is set in New York City during the winter of 1981, statistically the most dangerous year in the city’s history. The story plays out within a maze of rampant political and industry corruption that is plaguing the streets of a city in decay. Doing business at the epicenter of capitalism became fraught…
In terms of views and images, Jupiter Ascending is a spectacle with an impressive space footage, sometimes rousing action sequences and titillating extraterrestrial fantasies. But just as a book of Jack Vance, it really doesn’t make any sense in the beginning. The difference is that while reading that book of Vance, the intended message becomes…
