The Lunchbox marketing promises a kind of Indian take on Sleepless in Seattle, where two strangers – through the vagaries of chance and India’s carefully-orchestrated, but not flawless, lunchbox distribution system – begin a correspondence and fall in love before they ever meet. You know, the kind of frothy, featherweight romantic comedy that makes the…
Someday World is the child of two parents: two musicians, Brian Eno and Karl Hyde, who would each likely appear in my own personal top ten favourite musicians. It’s pointless to try to summarise the breadth of Eno’s inimitable musical career within the confines of a mere music review; suffice to say he contributes his…
Austrian creature-feature The Station (titled Blood Glacier elsewhere, which, awesome) tries to emulate the classics of the genre. Its first half is John Carpenter’s The Thing with a dash of Alien, as scientists investigating a remote glacier discover a blood-like substance that infects and transforms anything it comes into contact with into a bloodthirsty mutant,…
The Fault in our Stars is a Young Adult phenomenon, combining healthy box office receipts with a generally positive critical reception, but it’s yet another example of a mainstream movie that fails to engage with modern teenagers’ reality. Despite flaunting contemporary technological trappings – X-Boxes and iPhones (with increasingly popular texts-appearing-on-screen imagery) – The Fault…
Death seems to consume the small Irish town of County Sligo. The blue-grey ocean that borders its pallid beaches stretches to infinity. Waves crash against the black, rectangular rocks that reach out hopelessly like deific digits, long-forgotten obsidian coffins. An immense mesa looms in the distance, resembling a church’s altar or, perhaps, a tomb. Calvary…
It’s possibly unfair to complain about the predictability of Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Is it the filmmaker’s fault that the trailer prominently includes the climactic showdown between revolutionary, super-intelligent apes and police? Probably not. But when the predictability of the narrative is informed by a familiarity with Planet of the Apes or,…
Jersey Boys is based on the hugely successful Broadway musical telling the story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, but it isn’t exactly a musical – if we disregard the weirdly incongruous musical number that plays over the credits, anyway. Musical biopic would be a better description, as we follow the career of Frankie…
Like the paper flowers that William Blake (Johnny Depp) finds absent natural scent, Dead Man is built on self-conscious artificiality. Jim Jarmusch’s neo-Western is as influenced by woodcut animation or a matinee performance of a silent-movie serial; where Sergio Leone’s post-modern approach the Western exaggerated the cinematic tropes of the genre, Jarmusch filters those conventions…
“Why can’t I be Frank?” That’s the question that comes to hang over milquetoast, mediocre keyboard player Jon (Domhnall Gleeson), just as the sullen mannequin-fucker Don (Scoot McNairy) predicted it would. The Frank in question is played by Michael Fassbender, though you’ll have to take my word for this, as he spends the majority of…
Today heralded the end of a great Australian festival that has lasted over two decades. I’m not referring to the Big Day Out, whose cultural capital was irrevocably eroded by the influx of teenage, Australian-flag-wearing bogans a decade ago and has limped its way to extinction ever since. No, I’m talking about the Brisbane International…
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