42 Results

Director Seth Gordon’s blokey middle-of-the-road comedy about three buddies united by contempt for their bosses has a premise audiences will either instantly relate to or feel damn fortunate that they don’t. In Horrible Bosses Nick (Jason Bateman), Kurt (Jason Sudeikis) and Dale (Charlie Day) loathe their superiors. And who can blame them? There’s Kevin Spacey [...]

Having now watched and reviewed 40 films in 10 days, I am now deep within the belly of the MIFF beast, and evidence that this extreme exercise in movie-watching may be having physical and psychological effects is mounting. Fellow MIFF blog-a-thoner Thomas Caldwell has confirmed a rumour bandied about town that, attacked by reality at [...]

Superhero movies have a way of sucking the credibility out of Hollywood actors – even those who didn’t have much to begin with. Brandon Routh’s career stocks plummeted after donning the undies-outside-your-pants-look in the dreadful Superman Returns (2006). Billy Zane is still red in the face from squeezing into the purple suit in The Phantom [...]

The real dilemma in watching Ron Howard’s new movie is not the one the characters mull over – whether a man should tell his best buddy that his wife is having an affair, which is obviously YES – but rather what to make of this noodle-scratching dramedy and the spectacular incompetency the veteran director exhibits. [...]

Director Roger Michell’s feel good comedy Morning Glory, set in the sleep deprived world of early morning TV broadcasting, is a lightweight crowd pleaser that makes very strong and very different statements about its two top billing stars. The first is that Rachel McAdams, whose bubbly champagne charisma and girl next door good looks are [...]

The usually liquid and lusty figures of Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie look feeble and worse for wear in 2010’s most befuddling high profile American release: the awkwardly timed, awkwardly acted, awkwardly written action/comedy/crime caper The Tourist from German filmmaker Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, who wrote and directed the enthralling Oscar winning political thriller The [...]

There is something truly despairing about following Robert DeDiro’s transition from a great dramatic act to a goofy, asinine comic. It feels like watching a loved one slowly deteriorate into madness and ill health; at first it might be amusing – forgettfulness, unpredictable faux pas, weird behaviour like fruit oranges under the bed, reading books [...]

Director John Erick Dowdle’s two parts psychological one part supernatural thriller Devil has been billed as coming “from the mind of M Night Shyamalan.” That’s a good start, because the dire quality of Shyamalan’s recent work (The Last Airbender, The Happening, Lady in the Water) suggests ideas have been coming out of quite a different [...]

In a gutsy venture into the realm of skinflint science fiction writer/director/cinematographer/penny pincher Gareth Edwards stretches every thread of a shoestring budget to try to trick audiences into believing they’re watching a “big” movie. The tale of photographer Andrew (Scoot McNairy) and his boss’ daughter Sam’s (Whitney Able) dangerous trek to America at a time [...]

Just one week after Machete sliced open the diaries of Australian cult cinema appreciators a locally made ball-breaker with striking similarities arrived: writer/director Patrick Hughes’ ferocious neo-western Red Hill. With a clop of hooves and a few thousand rounds of ammunition Hughes charters a violent path straight into the pool room of the seldom visited, [...]

The considerable comedic talents of Robert Downey Jnr and Zack Galifianakis are largely squandered despite best efforts from all and sundry in Due Date, a good-natured on the road odd couple comedy from The Hangover director Todd Phillips. Flying home for his wife’s birth, slick sharp-mouthed architect Peter Highman (Downey Jnr) accidently crosses paths with [...]

Exploitation movies don’t get much more deliriously exploitative than pulpy auteur Robert Rodriguez’s high-octane tribute to grindhouse cinema, Machete, co-directed by his long-time collaborator Ethan Maniquis. Grindhouse is a genre celebrated for its so-bad-it’s-kinda-good blends of gratuitous nudity, laughably unrealistic gore and shonky plotlines perfect for late night thrill seekers – the sort of crowd [...]

Short film director Rachel Ward’s feature film debut is a ruminative heal-the-past drama with an incestuous twist. In Beautiful Kate Bryan Brown plays a dying pale-faced codger who is visited by his estranged son Ned (Ben Mendelsohn) in an attempt to ameliorate old familial wounds before the miser takes his last bitter breath. The film [...]

Harry Potter movies mean different things to different people. I was reminded of this after I exhaled a long face-heavy yawn two or so hours into Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and noticed the sound of sobbing – not crying, but sobbing – coming from someone in the row behind me.  After six movies [...]

Director Glendyn Ivin strikes acting gold with the pairing of heavyweight Hugo Weaving and young wide-eyed neophyte Tom Russell in Last Ride, a grim but ponderous father/son character study told in the style of a hazy road movie with no obvious starting points or destinations. Ten year old Chook (Russell) is a bushy-tailed portrait of corruptible [...]

Jack Black and Michael Cera play, well, Jack Black and Michael Cera in this giddily anachronistic tale of two BC boneheads who coast through a series of biblical but not comedy sketches. Year One’s trying-awfully-hard succession of largely puerile punch lines come curtsey of veteran director Harold Ramis, whose benchmark work – the 1993 masterpiece [...]