At the exact moment Jason Bourne was fished out of the Mediterranean Sea, in Doug Liman’s The Bourne Identity in 2002, the action genre changed. Gone were the campy villains, the outlandish set-pieces and the idealised heroes. Instead came a gritty, crunching realism, that was, at the time, refreshing. But in Jason Bourne’s wake came … >
It was well over a decade ago that Antoine Fuqua’s gritty, intense and shocking police-action film Training Day propelled Denzel Washington to an Acadamy Award and straight into the A-list. Their screen-fortunes have been mixed in the time that’s elapsed since, but with The Equalizer, we’re treated to a long over-due reunion between director and … >
The Woman in Black, 2012’s adaptation of Susan Hill’s book of the same name, was an authentically creepy and pleasingly old-fashioned ghost story, hampered somewhat by a poor lead character and an unconvincing performance from Daniel Radcliffe. The Woman in Black: Angel of Death suffers a reverse of the first instalment’s fortunes, boasting as it … >
Hallowe’en is fast approaching, and as is tradition, cinemas flood themselves with horror films to mark the occasion. Front-runner this season is Australian horror The Babadook. If it sounds like a children’s film, that’s the idea. The plot follows widowed mother Amelia, a nurse who’s struggling to raise her hyperactive, behaviourally challenged six year old … >
From the moment it was announced, there was much speculation surrounding Michael Bay’s big screen take on the turtles. ‘It’s going to be like Transformers, only worse!’, people cried. ‘They’ve got nostrils!’, fans wept. ‘Megan Fox!’, everyone pondered, scratching their heads in confusion. ‘Didn’t she compare to Michael Bay to Hitler?’ A year or so … >
Doctor Who’s Karen Gillan and Battlestar Gallactica’s Katee Sackhoff come together as mother and daughter in this horror movie from Absentia director Mike Flanagan. Oculus sees Kaylie Russell (Gillan) try to help herself and her brother Tim, played by Australian actor Brenton Thwaites (Maleficent), come to terms with their shared childhood trauma – where Tim … >
Set alongside the events of Zack Snyder’s 2006 movie, the sequel to 300 focuses on Greek general Thermistokles as he tries to take down Persian forces led by god Xerxes and his right hand woman Artemisia. 300: Rise of an Empire continues the ultra violence and stylised visual effects that made 300 great. There’s probably … >
In 2005, Sin City burst onto the scene like nothing we’d seen before. Slick, stylish, brutal and toeing the line between pastiche and thriller with an unexpected lightness of touch, Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller’s comic book thriller went on to inspire countless rip-offs and imitations. Nine years on, the long-awaited sequel has finally emerged, … >
Into the Storm is, in many ways, a film that feels overdue. For years now it seems that every time you turn on the news, Mother Nature is battering some corner of the Earth, be it hurricanes in the U.S., typhoons in the Pacific or earthquakes and tsunamis in Japan. The footage that news reports … >
Imagine you took Limitless, stripped away the internal logic, cut it with an episode of Planet Earth, and force fed everyone involved a lot of crack cocaine. You would more or less have Luc Besson’s new film, Lucy. Our gal Lucy (Scarlett Johansson) is an American student in Taiwan who finds herself in hot water … >