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Machete
[ Hits:549 ]
Review: Grindhouse, a double bill featuring Deathproof and Planet Terror, was created as a tribute to the lost genre of exploitation films as made famous by single screen theatres across America in the '70s. Sleaze, porn, slashers and kung fu flicks were the rage back then and this was the era that directors like Grindhouse directors and collaborators, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez grew up in. The homage to grindhouse cinemas made its mark... violent, sexual, deviant and overtly over-the-top wi...
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Mad Money
[ 2008 ] [ Hits:375 ]
Review: Mad Money is directed by Callie Khouri, who won an Oscar for her writing on Thelma & Louise. Add three prominent actresses in Diane Keaton, Queen Latifah and Katie Holmes and you’ve got the ultimate chick flick, right? Wrong. This money heist movie may be all about the girls, but that doesn’t stop the guys from enjoying this crime comedy caper. Three female employees at the Federal Reserve hatch a “foolproof” plan to steal money that is about to be destroyed. Don’t get me wrong, this i...
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Made of Honour
[ 2008 ] [ Hits:420 ]
Review: Made of Honour is yet another romantic comedy from the heart-shaped Hollywood trinket box. The film gets a few extra marks for tackling the “best man is better” and “best friend lovers” from a different angle, but nothing has really changed as a ladies man tries to win his best friend’s heart over after she asks him to be her Maid of Honour. The best man/maid of honour switch provides most of the comic material and tends to fuel the film to its lame conclusion. The comedy is comprised ...
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Man on a Ledge
[ Hits:288 ]
Review: Man on a Ledge stars Sam Worthington, whose robotic acting is best forgotten in blockbusters such as Avatar, Clash of the Titans and best remembered in Terminator: Salvation, where he was actually part cyborg. As you can imagine with any movie where the lead character wants to commit robot suicide off a high-rise building - expectations were low.
Thankfully relatively unknown director Asger Leth and TV movie screenwriter, Pablo F. Fenjves have managed to negotiate a pretty decent thriller with ...
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Man on Wire
[ 2008 ] [ Hits:585 ]
Review: Man on Wire is the story of French tightrope walker, Phillipe Petit. For all intents and purposes, it’s probably better to call him a wire walker as his biggest feats were achieved balancing on cables. Petit’s name is not synonymous with his life. The man’s a living legend with his crowning achievement being an illegal high-wire walk between New York City’s World Trade Center twin towers in 1974. This documentary uncovers Petit’s background and reconstructs events building up to this i...
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Management
[ 2009 ] [ Hits:362 ]
Review: Management is an oddball romantic comedy starring Jennifer Aniston, Steve Zahn and Woody Harrelson. The cast have had their fair share of ups and downs in Hollywood... but that's enough about their private lives. Aniston revisits her role from The Good Girl to produce another decent performance in this off-kilter "romcom". She's the main draw card amid a crest of familiar faces. Steve Zahn takes the spotlight, although as the title and movie poster suggests, he plays second fiddle to one of Holl...
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Maos Last Dancer
[ 2009 ] [ Hits:594 ]
Review: Mao's Last Dancer, finally - a dance film where the story line is just as fantastic as the dancing - and true! The extraordinary biography of Li Cunxin makes a graceful leap from autobiography to film under the watchful eye of Australian-born director, Bruce Beresford (Paradise Road, Driving Miss Daisy) and screenwriter, Jan Sardi (Shine). The tag line for Mao's Last Dancer is 'Before You Can Fly, You Have To Be Free', an underlying theme throughout the drama with sharp contrasts between America...
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Margin Call
[ Hits:250 ]
Review: The award-winning documentary Inside Job drilled down into what caused the 2008 financial crisis by consulting some of the finest financial experts. Margin Call creates a fictionalised account of the most critical 24 hour period of the meltdown, featuring some of Hollywood's most respected actors.
Margin Call is a companion piece to Inside Job in the style of 12 Angry Men, offering outsiders a glimpse into the backroom ethics and doomsday plotting of an investment bank on the brink of collapse....
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Marley & Me
[ 2008 ] [ Hits:279 ]
Review: Marley & Me is a film starring Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston as young married couple, John and Jennifer Grogan, on the verge of starting a family. The sweet pair are at the stage of life when a “trial child” seems like a good idea… and this is where Marley comes in. He’s an adorable Labrador pup, who’s trouble from the get-go. Marley eats dry wall, howls at night and is a pet from Hell. Now, if you’re expecting a soppy romantic comedy with a dog, you’ll be surprised. The Grogans...
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Master Harold... and the Boys
[ Hits:750 ]
Review: Master Harold... and the Boys is an adaptation of Athol Fugard's acclaimed stage play about a young boy wrestling with his convictions when it comes to his father and his caretaker in 1950s South Africa. The era, known for its discriminatory racist government policies, separated South Africans and created barriers preventing black South Africans from enjoying equality and the same level of privileges as their white counterparts. This tense atmosphere fuels the drama of Master Harold... and the B...
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Material
[ Hits:791 ]
Review: Material is one of the smartest, most heartwarming movies to originate from South Africa, telling the story of a young Muslim man whose love for stand-up comedy leads to conflict when his father expects him to take over the family business.
There's always a hint of seriousness in a joke and as John Cleese once noted - "comedy is very much like tragedy". Material is a comedy drama, what's come to be known as a "dramedy", creating an uneasy balance between domestic strife and life's funnier mome...
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Max Payne
[ 2008 ] [ Hits:428 ]
Review: Max Payne gets its long-awaited adaptation into film. Anyone that has played Max Payne will agree that Max Payne (2008) captured the atmosphere from the game. The subways, dark alleys and dark light are Max’s world, and translate well on the big screen. However, the story and characters could have been lifted from a script for another film. Max Payne is void of key Payne elements, which would align the adaptation to the video game. The movie adaptation substitutes pain killers for a top secret...
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Megamind
[ Hits:708 ]
Review: It seems that if you're blue, you're in vogue... well that's if pop culture in 2010 is anything to go by with James Cameron's Na'vi tribesmen in Avatar, The Smurfs feature film and now our giant blue-headed villain in Megamind. Perhaps Andy Warhol was really onto something with his colour transition duplications of Marilyn Monroe and John Wayne's heads when he coloured them blue? Perhaps it's the post-recession/posthumous Michael Jackson era that's made being blue cool again... although quite fr...
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Michael Clayton
[ 2008 ] [ Hits:386 ]
Review: An attorney gets caught up in a major class action lawsuit that could very well be his last, but Michael Clayton isn’t an ordinary legal drama and thriller. There aren’t any court room drama scenes, there aren’t any jury back room scenes and the film tends to focus on motive and emotion. The narrative structure isn’t chronological, but slowly feeds the rope until you hit the anchor. This film garnered several Oscar nominations including: best lead actor in George Clooney, best supporting...
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Midnight in Paris
[ Hits:192 ]
Review:
Woody Allen movies don't strike a chord with each and every type of film fan, that's a given. This is most probably due to his very eccentric style that includes weird dialogue timing, strange plot twists and his predisposition for a select group of actors. Nevertheless, there's always a lot of excitement around each new release from the mind of this quite comical little man – Everyone waits with bated breath to see if the next will be another big hit or another unsatisfying cinematic fail.
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Milk
[ 2008 ] [ Hits:441 ]
Review: Milk is the biography of Harvey Milk, who became California’s first openly gay elected official. The film is directed by Gus Van Sant of Elephant and more recently, Paranoid Park, and written by Dustin Lance Black of Big Love. However, its Sean Penn as Harvey Milk, who steals the show. Penn won an Oscar for this role with a powerhouse performance that breathes life back into the character of Milk. His mannerisms, speech patterns and homosexuality are staple components of the performance, and P...
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Mirror Mirror
[ Hits:71 ]
Review: Mirror Mirror is a re-imagining of the fairy tale classic Snow White. The comedy fantasy stars Julia Roberts, Lily Collins, Armie Hammer with Nathan Lane and is directed by Tarsem Singh, best known for Immortals. This is the first of two Snow White inspired films for 2012 with Snow White and the Huntsman scheduled for later this year.
Singh's recent Greek action epic Immortals was a dazzling spectacle, but lacked in performance and storytelling. Sadly, the same is true of Mirror Mirror. Whil...
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Missing Pieces
[ Hits:610 ]
Review: Missing Pieces is an independent film, one which has painstakingly made it through countless reshoots, rewrites and sleepless nights. Kenton Bartlett, a young film-maker at the heart of Missing Pieces, would be the first to admit the production was a serious learning curve - one with its highs and lows. The end result is an indie drama, mystery and romance with a jigsaw narrative, similar to Memento, and a haunting atmosphere comparable to Never Let Me Go.While not in the same league as the afor...
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Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol
[ Hits:154 ]
Review:
As an instantaneous fan of almost everything that Tom Cruise touches (except the horrible ‘Knight and Day’), it didn’t take much effort to get me terribly excited for the release of the latest Mission Impossible film. What I was expecting was thrilling action sequences, dazzling set pieces and a few cheesy action one-liners – I got all of this, with a little touch of ‘awesome’ added that sweetens this fantastic popcorn spectacle even further!
Of course, Tom Cruise is back in full ...
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Mission: Impossible III
[ 2006 ] [ Hits:346 ]
Review: Mission: Impossible III is the third instalment in the successful MI series (pretty obvious right?). Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is brought back into the action (will he ever die?) and is pitted against sadistic arms dealer Owen Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman). His first “impossible” mission is to recover a fellow IMF (Impossible Mission Force) operative, who is missing. His plans to settle down with Julia (Michelle Monhagan), his new fiancée, are disrupted and he’s forced to go undercover wi...
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