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District 9 [ 2009 ] [ Hits:18163 ]
Review: Watching District 9 was a new film experience, which could only be described as Hotel Rwanda, Fido and Lars and the Real Girl... in a blender. In retrospect, it's all of that and more. Neill Blomkamp burst onto the movie scene in 2005 with Alive in Joburg, a fascinating Sci-Fi/Documentary short film about aliens in Johannesburg... what, you didn't hear about it? Don't worry, it wasn't a hostile threat - didn't even make the news.The 6-minute short film caught the eye of Peter Jackson, who instan...

Iron Man [ 2008 ] [ Hits:8905 ]
Review: Tony Stark (Downey Jr.) is a wealthy weaponry expert and tycoon, who starts to use technology for good after he narrowly escapes armed forces in an armoured suit made from scrap metal. This Iron Man, a story about unlikely heroes. Most people may have heard about this particular superhero, but don’t have much of a back story. The one big difference between Iron Man and most other superheroes is that he’s a self-made man. Now you wouldn’t guess this at first because Tony Stark’s intellige...

Gravity [ 2013 ] [ Hits:5157 ]
Review: Gravity writer-director, Alfonso Cuarón has always wanted to be two things: a director and an astronaut. These lifelong dreams meshed somewhere along the way to become his magnum opus, Gravity, a breathtakingly beautiful, mesmerising, visceral and moving space film about a medical engineer and an astronaut, who work together to survive after an accident leaves them adrift in space. The film was previously on ice owing to the fact that Cuarón's vision required technology that only surfaced in...

Ghost in the Shell [ Hits:3552 ]
Review: Ghost in the Shell is based on a manga series, which was later adapted into an animated feature in 1995. Partly inspired by Arthur Koestler's The Ghost in the Machine and partly an inspiration for The Matrix, this much-loved Japanese series continues to inspire. Now unveiling its latest iteration, an almost inevitable live-action adaptation, starring Scarlett Johansson and directed by Rupert Sanders, we get a chance to see Major come alive... even if her shoes seem too big for her. The film tak...

Spider-Man: Homecoming [ Hits:12964 ]
Review: Spider-Man, Spider-Man, Spider-Man... no, this isn't the theme tune. It's how you'd sound counting the number of Spider-Man franchises over the last 15 years. While this superhero has had as many actors don the web-tangled red-and-blue as there have been Hulks in as many years, it's starting to get ridiculous. No one ever thought they'd see Garfield and Spider-Man in the same movie, let alone the same sentence, and yet it happened with The Amazing Spider-Man. Andrew Garfield is a terrific actor ...

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets [ Hits:13060 ]
Review: Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is a fun-filled and eye-popping sci-fi comedy action adventure that recalls the quirky, comic spirit of Besson's previous sci-fi extravaganza The Fifth Element, the CGI dimension of James Cameron's Avatar and the technologically imaginative and bizarre world of David Cronenberg's existenZ. Based on the influential comic book series of the same name, we follow 28th Century special operatives, Valerian and Laureline, who must race to identify a marauding...

War for the Planet of the Apes [ Hits:13061 ]
Review: Andy Serkis is the ringmaster in the reboot series of The Planet of the Apes. A pioneer of iconic digital characters, having played Gollum in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, he's done it again with Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and now War for the Planet of the Apes. His latest action-adventure sees Caesar, the figurehead and lead for the series, rightfully front and centre. The character has not only developed in terms of characterisation, but in terms ...

Passengers [ Hits:3671 ]
Review: Passengers is a sci-fi romance thriller, directed by Morten Tyldum and starring Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence. It's a sci-fi because the story takes place in outer space, dealing with a transporter by the name of 'Avalon', which holds over 5000 passengers on a 120 year voyage to 'Homestead II'. Their hibernation pods prevent them from ageing, allowing them to essentially travel into the future, foregoing friends and family on earth to start over on a new colony. The corporate colonisation of...

Arrival [ Hits:3745 ]
Review: Arrival is a science fiction mystery drama from Denis Villeneuve, based on the short story Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang. Villeneuve continues his outstanding run of form: having directed Incendies, Prisoners, Enemy and Sicario, he turns his attention to science fiction with Arrival. The film has similarities with Contact, the Robert Zemeckis film, in which Jodie Foster plays a woman desperately trying to interpret a message to prove the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence originat...

Star Trek Beyond [ Hits:3807 ]
Review: Star Trek Beyond is the third film in the latest iteration of Star Trek. The first two films, Star Trek and Star Trek Into Darkness, were directed by J.J. Abrams, but since he's crossed over to the Star Wars camp with Star Wars: The Force Awakens, they've forced him to pick a side to keep peace on earth. Star Trek Beyond was entrusted to Justin Lin, a director who has made a name for himself directing Fast and the Furious sequels, a series with a growing ensemble and big effects. Lin has shown h...

X-Men: Apocalypse [ Hits:4012 ]
Review: X-Men: Apocalypse is the latest installation from director Bryan Singer and writer Simon Kinberg. X-Men: First Class introduced us to the next generation of X-Men, enabling the filmmakers to go back in time and extrapolate the complex story between Professor X and Magneto, and the rise of the X-Men. Singer returned to the franchise, after something of a hiatus, with X-Men: Days of Future Past. The superhero balancing act turned out to be one of the year's best films, with Singer essentially spl...

Captain America: Civil War [ Hits:3845 ]
Review: Captain America: Civil War continues in the tradition of Captain America: The Winter Soldier. It sounds like an obvious statement when you consider it follows as a sequel, but these sequels are very different from Captain America: The First Avenger. The first installation was an origins story and focused on Steve Rogers, or Captain America, played by Chris Evans. While more than competent, Evans isn't the most charming actor to don spandex and despite his best efforts to fly solo, a captain need...

Star Wars: The Force Awakens [ Hits:3920 ]
Review: Star Wars: The Force Awakens is the long-awaited sequel that re-ignites the Star Wars Universe with a seventh episode. After a successful Star Trek reboot, Spielberg-in-the-making J.J. Abrams was entrusted to deliver a film that picks up the story decades after the original trilogy, now existing within the Disney empire under the banner of recent acquisition, Lucasfilm. A lot has changed since Harrison Ford last tag teamed with a wookie as famed odd couple, Han Solo and Chewbacca. Film technolo...

The Martian [ Hits:3819 ]
Review: The Martian is a Ridley Scott film. While the director is best known for Alien, and less so for Prometheus, he's gone for a much more scientific space film, undertaking the adaptation of Andy Weir's novel. It's been accurately described as "Apollo 13 meets Cast Away" as the realism of the NASA lunar misadventure is coupled with the spirit and tenacity of the stranded survivor drama. We're thrown in the deep end as a mission to Mars is aborted and botanist, Mark Watney, is left for dead. As the ...

Fantastic Four [ Hits:3940 ]
Review: Fantastic Four was a film with serious potential featuring: Chronicle's exciting director, Josh Trank, accomplished screenwriters including X-Men's Simon Kinsberg and an up-and-coming cast with Whiplash's Miles Teller, Fruitvale Station's Michael B. Jordan, it-girl Kate Mara, Toby "Koba" Kebbell and even that kid from Billy Elliot. When stars collide... it's either a magical union or a black hole. Fantastic Four doesn't live up to its name. In fact, it doesn't even live up to the serviceable 20...

Ex Machina [ Hits:3953 ]
Review: Ex Machina is a sci-fi thriller from Dredd, Sunshine and 28 Days Later... screenwriter Alex Garland, whose directorial debut is eerie, beautiful, sparse and thought-provoking. It's a wonderful piece of science fiction, delving into the arena of artificial intelligence with unsettling, provocative drama and keeping an air of suspense with mysterious motives and a slow-burning fuse. There's little spoon-feeding in this story about a programmer, who wins the chance to participate in a groundbreaki...

Terminator: Genisys [ Hits:3876 ]
Review: After a mesmerising movie poster, a marketing stunt where Arnold Schwarzenegger pranked people at Madame Tussard's in Hollywood and an endorsement from James Cameron that this film would be the actual third film in the series, there was much excitement and anticipation around the release of Terminator: Genisys. This reboot starts in the future, where John Connor send Kyle Reese back in time to protect his mother. When Reese arrives in 1984, nothing is as he expected. The latest Terminator inst...

CHAPPiE [ Hits:4436 ]
Review: Chappie is Neill Blomkamp's latest thought-provoking sci-fi actioner, following in the wake of Elysium and the revered District 9. Die Antwoord were blown away by District 9 and felt an immediate synergy with Blomkamp, leading the zef rappers and director to join forces. Adamant that they be themselves in the film, Chappie was born out of the idea that Ninja and Yo-landi raise a robot. While Neill Blomkamp and Die Antwoord share a fierce desire to create original, surprising and inherently raw ...

Plato's Reality Machine [ Hits:4141 ]
Review: For Charles, video games are an escape, but when Sophia leads him on a mysterious quest through the spaceship, Plato... he discovers in the game of life, every heart is a moving target. Plato's Reality Machine is a sci-fi comedy romance that explores the lives of six New Yorkers via three unique perspectives. Writer-Director Myles Sorensen has assembled an independent film with a fresh-faced cast of up-and-coming talents in Trieste Kelly Dunn, Ed Renninger, Carolina Bartczak, Doug Roland, Heath...

Predestination [ Hits:4064 ]
Review: Predestination is an enchanting and mind-bending Australian sci-fi drama and crime thriller from Michael and Peter Spierig, starring Ethan Hawke. We follow a time-traveling Temporal Agent on a final mission to catch the one criminal that has eluded him throughout time. Ethan Hawke is sure-footed and reliably solid as our Temporal Agent, sporting a lisp and making the jump with a minimalistic, yet sophisticated time warp technology. He's supported by Sarah Snook, who delivers a well-weighted and...

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