Safe is like a poor man’s Mercury Rising – a film I never thought I’d reference, let alone compare favourably to anything. Ugly in both sentiment and style, it stars the undiscerning Jason Statham (The Bank Job) as an ex-cop, hit-man, cage-fighter, hobo and – why not – trash collector who’s forced to take on a cocktail of Manhattan’s scummiest scumbags in order to protect the life of an eleven-year [...]

Comparisons between Trainspotting and Irvine Welsh’s Ecstasy are inevitable, appropriate and a total disservice to the former.

Both films are set in the Scottish narcotics scene. Both are based on novels by Irwine Welsh. Both open with self-reflective narration from a thickly-accented protagonist, and both see him searching for drugs in his own faeces before the first twenty minutes are up. And yet everything that was fresh and exciting about Trainspotting [...]

Every few years on Halloween’s eve, somewhere between a sharp crack of thunder and a wolf’s longing howl, Tim Burton phones Johnny Depp to ominously announce:

“It is time.”

“Right,” Depp sombrely replies, “I’ll start applying the makeup.”

This is the unofficial story of how Burton and Depp’s eight collaborations have come to pass, the first being the broodingly brilliant Edward Scissorhands, and the latest being the broodingly not-so-brilliant-but-still-entertaining Dark Shadows.

Based on a [...]

After a couple of serious Hollywood misfires in the form of Gothika and Babylon A.D., Matthieu Kassovitz’s first French language film in over a decade is a tense, troubling and highly politicized return to form. Set during a guerrilla uprising in the French colony of New Caledonia that took place the late nineteen eighties, Rebellion [L’orde et la morale] stars Kassovitz himself as an experienced hostage negotiator and Special [...]

Super-producer Judd Apatow and his creative minions have given the romantic comedy a much needed shakeup in recent years, embracing humour of a more raunchy and irreverent variety while also pasteurising the classic formula with a welcome degree of sincerity. Still, if last year’s Bridesmaids is any indication, Apatow’s rom-com recipe has yet to be perfected, the film’s serious and silly elements struggling to meld into [...]

Every time I think American action films can’t get any more ludicrously jingoistic, Hollywood goes and proves me wrong. Act of Valor, a production over which the US Navy had final cut, made me yearn for the nuanced screenwriting of Battleship, the moderate politics of Transformers 3 and the versatility and range of Sam Worthington and Taylor Kitsch. A twelve million-dollar military recruitment ad tailor-made for the videogame [...]