Tag: action
Point Break
Thursday, January 7th, 2016 Film Reviews,There is no shortage of extraordinary nature cinematography in Point Break, but after watching The Revenant, it felt as artificial as a cartoon. The heavy imprint of CGI is all over this film, which is barely more than two hours of eye candy arranged over the flimsiest of plots. Before seeing this movie I would […]
Star Wars: The Force Awakens
Thursday, December 17th, 2015 Film Reviews,In preparation for the new Star Wars movie I planned to work my way through the six previous installments in this never-ending saga. At the end of the of year there is virtually nothing to write about until Boxing Day brings a swag of new releases, so I had time to do my homework. It […]
In the Heart of the Sea
Friday, December 4th, 2015 Film Reviews,Ron Howard is the kind of old-fashioned director Hollywood loves. He is happy to work with trash such as The Da Vinci Code (2006), but able to rise to the occasion when given a more challenging assignment such as Apollo 13 (1995) or Frost/Nixon (2008). The skill is to make the trash seem a little […]
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2
Thursday, November 26th, 2015 Film Reviews,After four gruelling installments the lucrative Hunger Games franchise has finally ground to a halt. Just as The Hobbit had to be extruded into a trilogy, with the entire third part based on only a few pages of the actual book, so too has Suzanne Collins’s young adult series been stretched beyond the point of […]
Spectre
Thursday, November 12th, 2015 Film Reviews,Each new James Bond movie arrives like a cinematic tsunami. You know it’s coming, and that it’s completely unstoppable. If all the critics in the world decided that Spectre was rubbish it would make very little impression on the box office. A Bond film, regardless of its merits and demerits, is a ‘Must See’. I […]
The Martian
Friday, October 2nd, 2015 Film Reviews,In 1964 Paramount released a movie called Robinson Crusoe on Mars, which may be viewed on YouTube. It tells the story of an astronaut stranded on Mars who must learn to survive in a hostile environment. Sound familiar? This is roughly the plot of Ridley Scott’s The Martian, based on a best-selling novel by science […]
Terminator Genisys
Saturday, July 11th, 2015 Film Reviews,If Sophie Barthes expects viewers to be already familiar with the story of Madame Bovary, the producers of Terminator Genisys seem to expect audiences to be intimately acquainted with every aspect of a franchise that began as far back as 1984. I’m reliably informed this new film skips the third and fourth sequels, and relates […]
Jurassic World
Saturday, June 27th, 2015 Film Reviews,Far From the Madding Crowd may have induced feelings of melancholy, but I felt grief stricken upon reading that Jurassic World had broken all box office records in its first weekend. The revenue is now over a billion dollars, and rising, which speaks volumes about the state of popular cinema. Just because Jurassic World is […]
Mad Max: Fury Road
Saturday, May 23rd, 2015 Film Reviews,Last week I got off a plane from Europe and within a few hours found myself at the movies waiting for the jet lag to kick in. I need not have worried because there is never a moment’s respite in Mad Max: Fury Road. It’s like absorbing a triple expresso on an intravenous drip. Some […]
‘71
Saturday, March 21st, 2015 Film Reviews,Yann Demange’s ’71, begins with two soldiers in boxing gloves beating each other to a pulp. This proves to be a relatively gentle opening for a relentless, heart-in-mouth thriller set in Belfast during the period euphemistically known as “The Troubles”. The movie follows a young British soldier, Gary Hook (Jack O’Connell), who finds himself trapped […]