x+y demonstrates that a documentarian’s skills don’t always translate into the world of fiction films. Director Morgan Matthews has been making documentaries since 2002, but this film is his first foray into fictional features. x+y takes inspiration from his 2007 film, Beautiful Young Minds, telling the story of Nathan, an autistic, talented teenage mathematician (Asa…
Insurgent, the first sequel of the dystopian young adult series that began with last year’s Divergent, hasn’t exactly been welcomed with open arms by the critical community. It’s currently sitting at 31% on Rotten Tomatoes, with widespread accusations that it’s little more than a cut-rate Hunger Games clone. I’m not entirely convinced by that argument,…
The Fast & Furious franchise’s seventh lap contains few surprises for those familiar with the franchise. Fast & Furious 7 (originally titled just Furious 7) doesn’t deviate from the well-worn path established by its predecessors, delivering the same mix of cars, fights, absurd stunts and bro-y banter that’s sustained the series for the past fourteen…
The premise of The DUFF is taken from a novel published in 2010, but it feels two decades older than that. DUFF, you see, stands for “designated ugly fat friend”; the kind of jokey attempt at anthropological analysis of high schoolers that went out of fashion around Mean Girls. The film’s titular DUFF is Bianca…
Looking back at The Fast and the Furious (in case you’re puzzled by the title, that’s the first one, made in 2001) from 2015, the film looks a lot like a stepping stone. An unassuming genre picture that shared more than a bit in common with the preceding year’s Gone in Sixty Seconds remake, its…
If you’ve been following ccpopculture for a while, you might have noticed that kids’ films are rarely reviewed here. That’s not an accident; I’m simply aware of my strengths and weaknesses as a critic, and writing about children’s entertainment is most definitely a weakness. When it comes to Shaun the Sheep, for instance, I can…
You don’t have dig particularly deep to find similarities between Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Russian drama Leviathan and Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Turkish drama Winter Sleep. They were erstwhile competitors across last year’s arthouse awards season; Ceylan took the lead early by picking up the Palme d’Or at Cannes, but Leviathan was more successful in more mainstream awards…
Up until now, Australian actor Damon Gameau had probably been best known as ‘that guy from The Tracker (Rolf de Heer, 2002)’ or ‘that guy from Underbelly: a Tale of Two Cities’. Nowadays, I suspect we’re more likely to start referring to him as ‘that sugar guy’, after his documentary, That Sugar Film. The film…
The world of T.S. Spivet (Kyle Catlett) is certainly inviting. It’s a splendiferous realm of rare bugs, perpetual motion machines and preternaturally gifted preteens, painted in a hyper-saturated palette of green grass, gold wheatfields and cerulean skies. Save for the dead twin brother, who wouldn’t want to live there? Jean-Pierre Jeunet delves into dense fantasia…
The original French title of Girlhood is Bande de filles – roughly, “girl gang” – and the difference between the two titles is illustrative of the dualism of director Céline Sciamma’s approach to the film. Centring on sixteen year old girl Marieme (Karidja Touré), the film provides an individual-centric portrait of her experience – friendship,…
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