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 [...]

There’s scarcely enough substance to Scott Hicks’ cloying romantic drama The Lucky One to pad out a short poem, let alone a feature film. As a stock-standard story of love and loss, it’s of little surprise that the film is a product of the fluff factory known as Nicholas Sparks, the prolific yet formulaic novelist of swoon-fiction hits like The Notebook and A Walk To Remember. Technically, The Lucky One [...]

Populated by paper thin characters and centred around a totally unconvincing love story, Simon Curtis’ My Week with Marilyn is a flat, bland and historically dubious biographical drama. Set during the shooting of Laurence Olivier’s The Prince and the Showgirl, the film recounts the story of an alleged romance between Hollywood icon Marilyn Monroe and young Englishman Colin Clarke, who later went on to write the two books on which the [...]

Ages of Love is the third part in the Italian “Manuel of Love” trilogy, and is itself made up of three separate chapters. These segments, christened “youth”, “maturity” and “beyond”, overlap and intertwin, as men and woman all over the Italian capital flirt and fornicate under the sparkling eyes of a taxi-driving, vest-wearing cupid. And it is truly appalling. Styled by its Australian marketers as an Italian Love, Actually, and [...]

Eurgh. That is my overwhelming reaction to Lisa Dunham’s Tiny Furniture, a directorial debut that I can acknowledge does a lot of things right, but I still found absolutely unbearable to watch. A story about a directionless college graduate who moves back in with her mother and sister, it’s a tale based, one suspects, on Dunham own life experience, even to the point that she casts herself and her family [...]