Let me start by saying that one of my biggest cinema cravings is monster movies. Especially GIANT monster movies. Maybe it’s the combination of horror, disaster and spectacle that does it, or it’s just the sheer twisted glee of watching a rampaging twenty-story “Something” stomp a metropolis into oblivion. Sadly, however, too many of them were well before my time and consequently more than a little dated for [...]

Attention Muggles, Death Eaters and Daniel Radcliffe groupies. The boy wizard is back again, this time sporting much more facial hair and a surly attitude, as the latest trailer for the Deathly Hallows has finally surfaced in the last week. The not-quite-final instalment of the hugely popular and moolah-making machine that is the Harry Potter film franchise is almost upon us. Warner Bros. Studios and Director David Yates [...]

In the “age of terror”, fear and suspicions over foreign peoples and cultures seem to be the order of the day. The media is filled with ludicrous hysteria over “terror mosques”, “Mossad hit teams” and whether or not President Obama is a “secret Muslim”. Among the know-it-all ignorant, lines are drawn and sides taken as they solemnly declare “the Muslims are coming to kill us” or “the Jews [...]

In late high school, like so many action movie fan boys, I dreamt up the ultimate cheesy action movie. That idea was Fight Team, an all-star action extravaganza that would feature the greatest names from action movie history: Sylvester Stallone, Jean Claude Van Damme and Steven Segal among them, with a special appearance from Arnold Schwarzenegger, and a surprise final-boss fight with Chuck Norris. At the end of the movie, they would all fist bump and yell “FIGHT TEAM!” It would be action awesomeness on an unparalleled scale.

It’s always a tricky act to make a movie about real-life leaders, especially if they are still fresh in people’s memories. Oliver Stone didn’t quite pull it off in his George W. Bush biopic W., despite having greater success with past biopics like Nixon and JFK. In The Special Relationship, however, director Richard Loncraine (My One and Only) and writer Peter Morgan (Frost/Nixon) succeeded beyond my expectations in portraying the very unique and compelling relationship between two former powers, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and US President Bill Clinton.

The Hedgehog, written and directed by Mona Achache and adapted from the novel by Muriel Barbary, begins with a stern and precocious 11 year old named Paloma (Garance Le Guillermic) explaining to her video camera that her sedate bourgeois life is roughly the equivalent of living inside a fishbowl. She declares that in order to escape such a horrible predicament, she will kill herself on her next birthday. A little grim perhaps, but somewhat typical for French quirkiness. Though a somewhat amusing hook, I was already dreading what this movie was going to become; a tired, contrived, all-too-pretentious, philosophical musing on the emptiness of upper class life. Luckily, to my great delight, I was very wrong.