‘Exhaustive’ is hardly the word for the documentary Marley. In detailing the life of legendary reggae singer Bob Marley, the film covers a staggering amount of ground that will likely please newbies and purists alike. The project has a troubled background: before ending up in the capable hands of Kevin MacDonald, both Martin Scorsese and Jonathan Demme had a run at it, the latter havin ...
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13 years have passed since Jason Biggs infamously enjoyed the pleasures of short crust pastry in American Pie. But while the gross out gags tend to linger in the memory (and they certainly didn’t hurt the film’s chances at the box office), it’s the residual sweetness of the first movie that really resonates. The blockbusting tale of a group of American teenagers aiming to lose th ...
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Given the rapturous reviews it’s received on review aggregate website Rotten Tomatoes, one could be forgiven for thinking that 21 Jump Street is the best comedy in ages. Hardly. This big screen adaptation of the 1980s cop series that catapulted Johnny Depp to stardom (and which he was reputedly embarrassed about afterwards), is earmarked by the aggressive vulgarity that tars the majority of ...
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The last Muppets movie (Muppets from Space) was a notable flop, both critically and commercially. But now our fuzzy friends have bounced back – yes, The Muppets is a roaring success. Or, one might say, a phenomenon. Do do, do do do.
It might be hard to resist bursting into song watching their latest escapade. But what’s impressive are the natural results on-screen – real ...
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Director Joe Carnahan bounces back from his noisy, impersonal A Team remake with The Grey: an impressively gritty and surprisingly thoughtful wilderness thriller. Liam Neeson stars as Ottway, a suicidal man tormented by memories of his wife, whose job it is to protect oil workers from roving animals. When his plane crashes in the wilderness (a genuine white knuckle sequence), the group find they m ...
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The Iron Lady
The Iron Lady makes for soft drama. That, unfortunately, is how this half-hearted biopic about Margaret Thatcher pans out. One of Britain’s most controversial Prime Ministers, whose time in office provokes fierce opinion even to this day, deserves better on-screen treatment than this.
However, this isn’t to undermine the outstanding work performed by Mer ...
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Hunter S Thompson based his novel The Rum Diary on his personal experiences working for a Puerto Rican newspaper in 1960 but it never saw publication until 1998; coincidentally, the same year that Johnny Depp starred as Thompson in Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Now, in Bruce Robinson’s adaptation of Thompson’s long delayed book, Depp returns as a pre-Gonzo incar ...
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The Change-Up is intermittently charming; frequently profane; mostly dull. More than anything it reinforces the somewhat depressing notion that mainstream American comedies are rapidly running out of ideas, over-compensating for the lack of creativity with a torrent of foul language. There’s nothing wrong with swearing or crude humour per se, as long as it’s used creatively (see the sc ...
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The kindest thing one can say about Transformers 3 is it’s not as bad as the second instalment. That’s damning with faint praise however, given the second film was an execrable, obnoxious piece of trash, and a massive step down from the more acceptable first. It’s simply a case of numbers: the first took more than $700 million worldwide against a $150 million budget; and the seco ...
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The somewhat spotty X-Men franchise has had its ups and downs over the years, but with X-Men: First Class, director Matthew Vaughn has taken the comic back to its origins and brought it back up to the level of Bryan Singer’s X2 from 2003. Much like Singer’s film (oft considered to be the best in the series), it has its problems, namely that it’s overly earnest, reliant on cheesy ...
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