March, 2012

Set over 24 hours and based in the headquarters of the first Wall Street investment firm to predict that the first waves of the GFC were about to hit, and hit hard, writer/director J.C. Chandor serves up a disaster movie with bad ledgers instead of trampled cities and sweaty people in suits instead of angry [...]

To mark the theatrical release of writer/director Gareth Evans’ hellzapoppin’ Indonesian action film The Raid (which opens March 22), Cinetology offers readers the chance to win one of 25 in-season double passes valid from March 26. To go in the running follow these steps: 1) became a fan of Cinetology on Facebook and 2) email me with your [...]

Writer/director Gareth Evans’ full throttle guns-n-fisticuffs Indonesian action flick is a hardcore bloke fest — the kind in which performances are measured by who can best impersonate someone who just murdered their parents with a pickaxe, chased it by drinking a pint of nails then sat down to watch three hours of lawnmower informercials. In The [...]

Belgian writer/director/producers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne capture with heartfelt verisimilitude a boy’s misplaced determination to find a father figure in The Kid With a Bike, a sad and sobering coming of age story told in the European style: no guarantees, no sugar coating, no fidelity to a three act structure. The central performance from lil [...]

The opening shot of director Bruce Robinson’s The Rum Diary — his first film in almost two decades — depicts a small plane flying into a beautiful coastal city hugged by deep blue water and cooked in sunshine. It’s a slick brochure-ready picture of San Juan, but it’s not long before we see the chaotic [...]

It has an odd ring to it, doesn’t it: 21 Jump Street, starring Academy Award nominee Jonah Hill. Hollywood’s latest remake of a barely remembered TV show, this one an 80s police drama featuring then teen idol Johnny Depp, arrives with a splash of Oscars pedigree. And, in terms of surprises, that ain’t the half [...]

Disney’s US$250 million intergalactic swords and sandals spectacle, replete with all the trimmings of blockbustepic excess, arrives hungry to mess with seen-it-before audiences who think they have the genre of spacey SCI-FI fantasies down pat. John Carter face plants into a stuffed trough of genres and sub-genres, new and old, and emerges covered in a [...]

Reese Witherspoon has a penchant for playing empowered female characters who are nevertheless confined to the kitchen of gender stereotypes, her oeuvre a sort of diluted, self-defeating brand of quasi-feminism for those who don’t have their hearts in it. She played the bitchy over-achiever in Election (1999), the virginal daughter of a headmaster in Cruel [...]

It’s a common perception of film critics: that they’re a bunch of insatiably word-hungry devourers of all kinds of cinema-related writing. But if your job involves writing about film, can reading other people’s commentary feel too much like work? A bit like you never left the office? Erin Free, editor of Australia’s longest running independent [...]