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 [...]

A montage of colour and sound, of wide smiles, street vendors and beach parties that stretch long in to the night, Wish You Were Here’s opening credit sequence captures exactly why it is that Australian tourists go to South East Asia to lose themselves. Sometimes, however, it’s a more literal disappearance than others. Centred around four friends on holiday in Cambodia who return home one man short, the first film [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

It may have been beyond woeful, but a $500m box office return pretty much guaranteed that Louis Leterrier’s Clash of the Titans was going to get a sequel. Picking up ten years later, the new story – if you want to call it that – follows Perseus, the mortal son of Zeus, as he is once again forced to do battle with mythological monsters to save humanity from annihilation. [...]

Even the combined charisma of Denzel Washington (The Taking of Pelham 123) and Ryan Reynolds (Green Lantern) can’t make Safe House seem like anything other than the derivative and unengaging nonsense that it is. After being captured in Cape Town, traitorous CIA agent Tobin Frost (Washington) is transported to a local safe house operated by low-level agent Matt Weston (Reynolds), a man frustrated with the lack of career [...]