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Review – Avengers: Age of Ultron
The eleventh entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) is an entertaining compromise. Writer and director, Joss Whedon, is caught between managing a lukewarm core story while pleasing the demands...
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Review – Infini
New science fiction cinema, more than most genres, is always riffing on past productions. Cherry picking from the best can produce bland results (see: Joseph Koinski’s Oblivion), while a devoted...
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Review – Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter
This review was first published in BMA Magazine. The 1996 film Fargo opens with “this is a true story”, when in fact, there was no core truth to the tale. The Coen Brothers took pieces from real crime...
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Review – Mad Max Fury Road
This review contains spoilers, you have been warned. One of the founding myths of cinema is a tale of the Lumiere Brothers’ screening of Arrival of the Train. The Lumiere Brothers played the 50 second...
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Review – Jurassic World
This review was first published at Graffiti with Punctuation. Elliot Ness (Kevin Costner) has a self-reflective moment in Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables about the methods required to bust Al Capone...
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Hollywood’s Nostalgia Addiction
With a new Top Gun movie in the works, a Terminator sequel blasting into cinemas, a Mad Max reboot wowing critics and a mediocre-at-best Jurassic World outdoing expectations at the box office, I wrote...
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Review – Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation
Once is chance, twice is a coincidence, and the third time is a pattern. We’re at the coincidence point in 2015 with blockbusters featuring a female character as the genuine lead while the male is...
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Review – The Wolfpack
If genetics are definitive in the development of a child, then parenting is a form of gambling. During adolescence, and into adulthood, a person is the culmination of the risks a parent takes;...
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Review: The End of the Tour
Arriving at The End of the Tour feels like being the final person in a game of ‘pass the message’. Director, James Ponsoldt, and screenwriter, Donald Margulies, are retelling a story captured by...
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Review: Straight Outta Compton
History is written by victorious billionaire rappers in Straight Outta Compton, a film designed to make you think rap group N.W.A were the only successful musical group to ever exist. And rightly so,...
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Review: The Martian
The solutions to life’s problems are ‘science’ according to The Martian. Mark Watney (Matt Damon) is an astronaut/botanist/bro who gets left stranded on Mars after a NASA mission is aborted and they...
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Review: Sicario
The promotion for Sicario emphasises the meaning of the word: ‘In Mexico, sicario means hitman’. The film even begins with the etymology of the word and finishes with what sicario means in Mexico:...
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Review: The Walk
Panic occurs early in The Walk and it has nothing to do with extreme heights or vertigo expected from a film about the true tale of Philippe Petit’s (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) high-wire walk between the...
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Review: Bridge of Spies
Espionage is the art of mastering the mundane. A white dinner jacket, Aston Martin and showy drink order will land the death penalty in Bridge of Spies, a film that’s about the grunt work of spies and...
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Review: Spectre
The James Bond film franchise is over 50 years-old and with the release of Spectre it’s now 24 films deep (25 if you include the generic brand Never Say Never Again). Commerce dictates that Bond will...
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Review: Creed
The love affair with the ‘boxing for life’ metaphor finds a worthy successor in Creed—the seventh film in the Rocky franchise, this ain’t no spin-off—but it has morphed into a multi-pronged beast of...
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Review: Carol
This review contains spoilers, mainly in structure. Carol is an invitation. An immaculately crafted summons to sit at the table with Therese Belivet (Rooney Mara) and Carol Aird (Cate Blanchett) and...
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Review: Star Wars The Force Awakens
Star Wars opens with the iconic image of a Star Destroyer flying overhead into the frame as it dwarfs a tiny spacecraft. Star Wars: The Force Awakens (the seventh episode in the series) opens with a...
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Review: The Revenant
If a teacher asked a group of eight-year-old boys to act out what they think it means to be a man, you’d probably get a lot of staged fighting, grunting and killing—little boys love to play war like...
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The Savage Optimism of Chi-Raq
Spike Lee is angry again. It’s exciting when a filmmaker of Lee’s caliber finds his rage (questionably absent for over a decade), although it’s usually over dire social circumstances. In Chi-Raq, it’s...
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