Moviedex » ★ ½

Safe (Review) | By Tom Clift

Tom Clift — Mon, 21 May 2012 03:31:37 +0000

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 [...]

Irvine Welsh’s Ecstasy (Review) | By Tom Clift

Tom Clift — Mon, 14 May 2012 05:19:03 +0000

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 [...]

The Lucky One (Review) | By Anders Wotzke

Anders Wotzke — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 09:20:42 +0000

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 [...]

My Week with Marilyn (Review) | By Tom Clift

Tom Clift — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 01:32:19 +0000

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 [Manuale d'am3re] (Review) | By Tom Clift

Tom Clift — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 02:30:29 +0000

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 [...]

Tiny Furniture (MIFF Review) | By Tom Clift

Tom Clift — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 02:54:06 +0000

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 [...]

Just Go With It (Review) | By Anders Wotzke

Anders Wotzke — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 11:43:28 +0000

‘Happy’ is a lovely, jovial word that becomes something quite vile and abhorrent when followed by the word ‘Madison’. If you didn’t know, Happy Madison is Adam Sandler’s very own production company, an amalgamation of Sandler’s 90s hits Happy Gilmore and Billy Madison. The company ostensibly came about in 1999 when Sandler began to observe the rising success of spam emails, realising that the very same distribution model and quality [...]

Bad Faith [Ond Tro] (BAFF Review) | By Anders Wotzke

Anders Wotzke — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 12:45:14 +0000

A symphony of snores could be heard throughout the cinema during Kristian Petri’s poorly plotted and limply performed Bad Faith, a reassuring sign that I wasn’t the only one who found this supposed crime thriller from Sweden not in the least bit thrilling.

The film’s ludicrous setup requires you to suspend all your disbelief as disillusioned Sweed Mona (Sonja Richter) stumbles upon the latest victim of the prolific Bayonet Killer. Rather [...]

I Am Number Four (Review) | By Anders Wotzke

Anders Wotzke — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 10:21:19 +0000

The fourth Twilight film isn’t due until November 17^th, so mankind still has a good couple of months to prepare for the Breaking Dawn of the Dead, whereupon all estrogen-producing creatures emerge at the stroke of midnight to collectively howl about how mortal men are neither deceased nor canine enough to satisfy their needs.

In the meantime, though, we still have to deal with [...]

Burlesque (Review) | By Anders Wotzke

Anders Wotzke — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 11:10:50 +0000

Surprisingly enough, Cher’s lips are hardly the fakest, most unsightly thing about Burlesque. Not when compared to the cringe-worthy performances, the ear-splitting musical numbers and a screenplay so ridiculously campy, it may very well cause straight men to see the rainbow.

It makes sense that the man responsible for this flamboyant turkey is Steven Antin, the openly gay producer of the star-searching reality TV series Pussycat Dolls Present: Girlicious. For his [...]