Director, Tim Story returns for another comedy-fueled ride-along with brothers “in-law” James (Ice Cube) and Ben (Kevin Hart). Right from the word go, we are reminded of the characters and their roles in the franchise – James, the tough-guy lead detective and Ben, the goofy sidekick seeking approval. In Ride Along 2, we follow the pair of…
For a film about a screenwriter’s perseverance for creative expression, Trumbo is rarely as inspired or diligent. Based on the life of Dalton Trumbo (Bryan Cranston), director Jay Roach’s biopic settles for a cordial yet straight-laced snapshot of 1950s Hollywood, unable to elevate political and libertarian motifs off the page. After being unjustly imprisoned for his…
Paul Feig has a lot to answer for. Judd Apatow too, come to think of it. These two men, who cut their teeth on Freaks and Geeks, have cast the mould for modern American comedy: in Apatow’s case, extended tales about arrested adulthood, in Feig’s case, putting women front-and-centre of the kind of crude comedies…
Watching David O. Russell’s Joy is akin to watching his career: abundant potential dribbling sadly away. The first half hour or so of the film, a biopic of Joy Mangano, Miracle Mop inventor (Jennifer Lawrence), takes the kind of stuff usually brushed over in these films – the anxieties of running household, familial tensions, financial…
Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant sets out to chart the farthest frontiers of humanity, stranding Leonardo DiCaprio’s bearded, badly-wounded protagonist in the wintery American wilderness and closely observing his desperate quest for survival …and revenge. When The Revenant focuses on the minutiae of survival in the wild – from cauterizing one’s wounds with burning grass…
Iris idolises Iris Apfel. So, it seems, does everyone else. At a glitzy fashion event, J.Crew creative director Jenna Lyons and fashion-enthusiast and hip-hop legend Kanye West alike dote on her. “She’s the perfect example of the intersection of fashion and interior design and art,” says one of documentarian Albert Maysles’ talking heads breathily. All…
It’s fitting that Kiwi splatter-comedy Deathgasm introduces its characters with notepad-scribble-flourishes. You see, this film – which combines death metal fanaticism with crude humour and imaginative gore – feels like the product of a couple Year 10 boys giggling at the back of science class, cobbling together ideas in the margins alongside deeply-etched pentagrams and…
Argentinian film The Secret in Their Eyes has been idling sloshing around my watchlist for a couple years now, buoyed by strong word of mouth and an Oscar win for Best Foreign Language Film. But I decided to hold off after hearing of the impending American remake starring the likes of Julia Roberts, Chiwetel Ejiofor…
I wanted to hate Youth. I usually walk into movies wanting to like/love them, but given my antipathy for Paolo Sorrentino’s Oscar-winning The Great Beauty, I was hoping for some more ammunition in my argument that it’s terribly overrated. Youth gave me sufficient ammunition, I’ll give it that. Sorrentino’s take on affluent, existential aimlessness, spent…
The worst kind of biopic is the Wikipedia-checklist biopic; The Program, in retelling Lance Armstrong’s rise and fall, instead opts for the ASADA-report-checklist, chronicling the cyclist’s doping habits in careful detail but failing to offer a substantial supplementary storyline. Admittedly, after a clunky cancer-centric introduction – think “I got the results of the test back.…
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