October, 2010

To mark the theatrical release of director Richard Gray’s Australian drama Summer Coda, starring Rachael Taylor and Alex Dimitriades, Cinetology gives readers the chance to win one of 10 double passes the see the film, valid nation-wide at participating cinemas until November 24. Here’s the official synopsis: Having grown up with her mother in Nevada, [...]

On a conceptual level it looked bold, borderline ridiculous: a movie about the founding of a website penned by a writer renown for verbose screenplays (West Wing scribe Aaron Sorkin) and directed by a filmmaker renown for visual bravado (Fight Club’s David Fincher). In other words the key talent driving The Social Network amounted to [...]

The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Returns and The Dark Knight Rises – not exactly innovative titles for Batman movies but they do the job. The third title was revealed by media shy writer/director Christopher Nolan in an interview published today in LA Times, which caused film bloggers and Batman groupies the world over (yeah, [...]

It will come as a surprise to nobody with a scintilla of knowledge about the Australian film industry that journo-cum-director David Michôd’s Melbourne-set crime opus Animal Kingdom scored big at this year’s AFI Awards nominations, which were announced earlier this afternoon. The film was nominated in every category in which it was eligible – 18 [...]

Despite spawning two sequels and several patchy imitators 1999′s dizzy nano-budget hit The Blair Witch Project – which infamously wooed audiences with close up-shots of a snotty nosed woman mumbling panicked gibberish – was widely regarded as a creative and financial once-off. That proved true, at least for ten years, because it took more than [...]

This week the curious news emerged that a sequel is in the works for director Larry Charles’s phenomenally successful 2006 Sacha Baron Cohen comedy Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. I should have perhaps prefaced that statement with “a sequel of sorts” given the bizarre nature of the project. [...]

A great film remade into a great film. Encountering them is exceptionally rare, cinema’s equivalent of trying to find a four leaf clover in a nuclear fallout or locating an op-shop that doesn’t stock Dan Brown or Michael Crichton. Decades of cinematic corkers remade into duds – The Pink Panther, Dinner for Schmucks, Psycho, The [...]

To mark the Australian theatrical release of director David Fincher’s “Facebook movie” The Social Network, Cinetology give readers the chance to win one of 20 double passes the see the film, valid nation-wide from October 28. Here’s the official synopsis: On an auntumn night in 2003, Harvard undergrad and computer programming genius Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse [...]

It says something about the quality of the Resident Evil movies that I can recall virtually nothing about them save for a few scattered visions: the lithe figure of Milla Jovovich air diving and body-contorting; the two shiny zombie slaying swords hung on her back; her character’s unwavering ability to transform bleach-white corridors of high [...]

Sometime during the embryonic stages of Ben Affleck’s career, the actor-cum-co-writer-cum-director pulled off – whether he meant to do it or not – one masterful impersonation of a lost puppy. Perhaps this was performed during an animal themed acting class improv exercise; perhaps the hot water had ran out at his place; perhaps Affleck had [...]

If your girlfriend, your boyfriend, your mother, grandmother, father, grandfather, friend, colleague or Facebook stalker convinces you to accompany them to a screening of Eat Pray Love, my immediate advice – conferred in the spirit of harm minimisation – is to wait until after the movie to eat. For this I have two reasons: 1) [...]

Warner Bros announced in a press release distributed over the weekend that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 – the first of the last Harry Potter movies (at least until the Rowling family squander all their dosh, which going by sales figures will take at least several generations) will not be released in [...]

The first stills have surfaced from the set of My Week with Marilyn, a Marilyn Monroe biopic in which Michelle Williams plays the iconic blonde bombshell. As you can see from the photo on the left (click to enlarge) Williams looks gorgeous with those famous cherry red lips and accompanying dimple, and the resemblance is [...]

The idea probably germinated during some kind of drunken haze – an early morning gamble involving inebriated filmmakers who could no longer maintain the brain activity required to play another hand. Conversation must have turned to the cinema. Blearily recalling single setting thrillers such as Cube (1997), Phone Booth (2002) and perhaps even Hitchcock’s Lifeboat [...]

It’s not exactly surprising that Dinner for Schmucks – a Hollywood remake of Francis Veber’s gloriously nasty French farce The Dinner Game (1998) – takes a sardonically witty film and reshapes it into something palatable for the kind of audiences aptly described using the last word of its title. If you loved the original film [...]

The Girl Who Played With Fire is a long, windy and exhausting thriller that treads the morally murky storytelling path of its long, windy and exhausting predecessor The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Director Daniel Alfredson gets down and dirty with the dark and grisly, wrapping an episodic whodunit plotline around a cocktail of grotesqueries [...]