February, 2010

This was supposed to be the movie that changed everything. Sandra Bullock, the critics crowed, is a changed woman. Her Oscar-nominated performance in The Blind Side was supposed to prove she wasn’t what many of us always suspected – a poorly programmed actor-emulating robot sent down from planet Ditsy to terrorise mankind with Miss Congeniality [...]

Kathryn Bigelow’s white knuckle bomb diffusing drama The Hurt Locker has swept the BAFTAs, winning six of eight nominations including Best Film, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best Cinematography. It’s been widely reported that the Hurt Locker’s BAFTAs sweep may place the film in an advantageous position when it goes head to head against [...]

If you walk into a screening of Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker with a set of fulsome fingernails, expect to leave with stubs. If you’re a chronic nail biter, except to leave with half your fingers gnawed off. There are intense films and then there are films are throbbingly white-knuckle as Bigelow’s swear-you’re-there story about [...]

On Tuesday long time lefty author/filmmaker John Pilger mounted his high horse and rode all the way to Australian website Online Opinion, where he contributed a scathing appraisal of some of this year’s highest profile Oscar-nominated films. While I generally find Pilger’s opinions interesting, his curt critiques of The Hurt Locker, Avatar and Up in [...]

Actor/writer/director/producer Tommy Wiseau’s independent film The Room has been famously dubbed “the Citizen Kane of bad movies.” In an interview, Wiseau’s responses were lengthy, waffling and borderline incomprehensible.

After the events that transpired last weekend the message to airlines across America is simple: don’t mess with Kevin Smith. The 39-year-old filmmaker has made it abundantly clear that, if sufficiently goaded, he will summon the Twitter forces of darkness to smite and belittle his enemies, thus causing one hell of a public relations nightmare. [...]

Writer/director Jacques Audiard’s Oscar-nominated French jail house drama A Prophet (Un prophète) is a long, deliberating and ultimately debilitating two-and-a-half hour journey – but by god, it packs a punch. A 19-year-old Arab man named Malik el Djebena (Tahar Rahim) is sentenced to six years in jail, where he is selected for special duties by [...]

Benicio Del Toro has always looked like the kind of actor who might at any given moment rip out the heart of a co-star and munch on it raw. There aren’t that many wolfish looking stars in Hollywood, and there’s only so much a pair of chunky sideburns can do, so it’s not hard to [...]

Daydreakers is the fiercely innovative revisionist vampire flick from Aussie tag team Michael and Peter Spierig (aka The Spierig Brothers) who burst on indie cult film scene with 2003’s zombie mayhem spectacular, Undead. Daybreakers arrives at cinemas as the latest in a recent tidal wave of vampire movies – including Twilight 1 and 2, Lesbian [...]

The gods of fine taste have a new enemy: a pipsqueak brat called Percy Jackson (Logan Lerman) who looks like he strayed from the set of a Clearasil commercial to star in his big screen debut – a knucklehead adventure/fantasy that plays like a pastiche of all the worst bits from the Harry Potter and [...]

At a time when the relentlessly homogenised ethos of vampire genre storytelling desperately needed to be rescued from the clutches of Robert Pattinson and associated Twihards comes the second blood-spangled flick from emerging horror writer/directors The Spierig Brothers. The Spierigs burst on the scene with a magnificent explosion of body parts in 2003’s zany Aussie [...]

The quality of acting in director Lee Daniels’s heart pulverising drama Precious is of such a high standard that even two mainstream musos – Mariah Carey and Lenny Kravitz – come out of it looking like seasoned professionals. You get the sense that it wouldn’t matter who Daniels dished out parts to (Chris Rock, Dwayne [...]