As a director Ben Affleck so far has a perfect strike rate with his three previous efforts behind the camera. First up was the tough Boston noir Gone Baby Gone, which was adapted from the novel written by Dennis Lehane (Mystic River), and starred younger brother Casey. Next up was The Town, a tough crime…
The best way to get anything other than disappointment out of Fifty Shades Darker is to enter the cinema with extremely low expectations. Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson return as the young couple Christian Grey and Anastasia (Ana) Steele in this, the second chapter of the bestselling Fifty Shades erotic romance trilogy by EL James….
Conspiracy theorists rejoice … for man didn’t really land on the Moon. At least that is the contention we have to work with in the mockumentary Operation Avalanche. The year is 1967. It is the height of the Cold War. The CIA suspects there is a Russian mole inside NASA, sabotaging the Apollo program so…
The Runner was about a congressman who tried to provide financial support for local fisheries after the disastrous BP oil spill in April 2010. Deepwater Horizon displays in a consistent manner the pure facts on the day of the fatal accident with this oil platform. It could have been just another disaster movie, like I’ve…
A Street Cat Named Bob is a heart-warming and enjoyable film about an unlikely friendship. Based on James Bowen’s best- selling 2013 autobiographical book, this is a feel-good film about how a homeless man turned his life around with the help of a stray ginger cat named Bob. Bowen (played by Luke Treadaway, from Unbroken)…
A bland first act opens up to a brilliant second, akin to a caterpillar metamorphosing into a radiantly colourful butterfly … in the MTC’s production of Born Yesterday, a screwball romance. This American stage classic starts with uncouth junkyard tycoon Harry Brock settling into a swank Washington hotel suite, ready to grease the palms of…
The Flaming Lips have been in the music game for at least 24 years. Within those 24 years they’ve made quite a impact from battling pink robots and wizards, messed with some dead petz, to recording a Christmas album, to celebrating Christmas on Mars, and having mixed results covering albums by the masters including King…
The history of the cinema is littered by well-intentioned but ill-thought-out attempts to bring stage plays to the big screen. The inherent contradiction between the theatre – where dialogue is the focus – and the cinema – where the emphasis is on visuals – sometimes does both the play and the movie in question a…
The moving Australian-produced drama Lion is based on the true story of Saroo Brierley, a young Indian boy from a poor rural family who, the age of five, became separated from his older brother Guddu in his native village and who eventually found his way home a quarter of a century later. Saroo (played by…
The host of the hit TV series The Amazing Race stars in, directs and has co-written Le Ride, a documentary re-creating arguably the harshest Tour de France of them all. Phil Keoghan has always had a fascination with stories about underdogs. He found a book about the history of New Zealand cycling and in it…
