Terence Davies’ The Deep Blue Sea is a miserable slog of a movie. Adapted from the 1952 award winning play by Terence Rattigan, the film is set in depressive post-war England, and recounts — with all the formality of a “Dear John” letter — the romantic turbulence that culminates in the attempted suicide of Hester Collyer (Rachel Weisz; The Whistleblower). Of a time and place where emotional outbursts are [...]

In 2011, I made close to one hundred and fifty trips to the cinema. The films I viewed came in all shapes and sizes, genres and languages, and ranged from good to bad to just plain unbearable. It’s a feat I’m both pleased and slightly embarrassed by (and one I suspect I may top before this current year comes to a close).

But even the biggest film buff (and I’m certainly [...]

Forget the rum; it’s the fun that’s running dry in Aardman Animation’s The Pirates! Band of Misfits.

While it’s pleasing to see the British animation studio return to their stop-motion roots after dabbling with CG in Flushed Away and Arthur Christmas, it would have been even more pleasing had this high-seas adventure been more memorable than middling. Aardman’s clay craftsmanship is still second-to-none, but the colourful array [...]

For most actors, the prospects of a lucrative Hollywood career and the lure of superstardom are enough to stick to formula and never stray far from it. The best actors, however, don’t sell tickets solely because of their dashing good looks, or because they’re starring in the latest action epic. No, they sell tickets because they seldom rest on their laurels, challenging themselves with (almost) every film by steering clear [...]

With the series largely driven out of pop-cultural consciousness by a combination of time and a slew of direct-to-DVD spinoffs, one might question the need for a fourth theatrical entry in the American Pie franchise. Surely such a sequel would be little more than a shameless cash-grab – an act of back-to-the-well laziness by a greedy studio and the prospect-less cast members alike. Well, you can hypothesize all you want [...]

Of all the words in my vocabulary, I never thought I’d use “bland” to describe a film by David Cronenberg. One of the pioneers of the so-called body horror genre in the seventies and eighties, the Canadian director’s fascination with corporeal corruption led to the creation of such cult favourites as The Brood, Videodrome and his oozing masterpiece, The Fly. Admittedly, the new millennium saw a certain restraint – what [...]