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 [...]

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 [...]

If you can look past the fact that Peter Berg’s Battleship is based on a board game, well, you’re doing better than me.  It’s just so ridiculous! I mean, at what point when playing with a bunch of white and red pegs do you stop and think: “Wait a minute, there’s a bazillion-dollar movie in this! Quick, get Liam Neeson on the line!”

But instead of trying to look past the [...]

It’s easy to roll your eyes at the endless fairy-tale “re-imaginings” Hollywood thrust upon us each year, but not even the credited authors of many of them, the Brothers Grimm, could claim them as original works. No, stories of lore are but a never-ending game of Chinese whispers, passed down through time from one raconteur to another, each adding their own personal flair to the fable. In Mirror Mirror, the [...]

Once is a coincidence, twice is an anomaly. Seventeen times is definitely a trend. A troubling tale of teenage naivety, 17 Girls [17 filles] takes its premise from a real life occurrence in a Massachusetts high-school in 2008, where seventeen students conspired amongst themselves to become pregnant. In this fictional French retelling, the trouble begins with queen-bee Camille (Louise Grinberg) reveals that she is up the duff. Seeking the support [...]

There are few filmmakers working in the action genre today who demonstrate the same wicked virtuosity as the double act that is Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor. Credited professionally as Neveldine/Taylor (an unconventional label that suits their unconventional style), the duo behind Gamer and the Crank movies are known for their hands-on approach to filmmaking that has seen them dangled off cliffs and dragged behind motorcycles on rollerblades, all in [...]