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Showing posts from May 25, 2014

Review: Dead Man Down

Colin Farrell has infiltrated NY criminal Terrence Howard’s inner circle with the specific purpose of seeking vengeance on him for the ordered hit on he and his family. His wife and kid died (all three are Hungarian immigrants, by the way!), but the idiot Albanian hit man didn’t check Farrell’s vital signs closely enough and now he’s going to take them all down one by one. Dominic Cooper plays another guy in Howard’s criminal organisation who joined around the same time as Farrell and has become a trusted friend to him. Meanwhile, Noomi Rapace plays a fragile, physically scarred neighbour who blackmails Farrell into helping her with her own vengeance plan. She wants him to kill the drunk driver whose actions caused permanent scarring to her face. F. Murray Abraham turns up as one of the trusted few who know of Farrell’s plan and true identity, Isabelle Huppert (!) is Rapace’s partially deaf mother, and Armand Assante has a cameo as one of Howard’s associates who starts to get nervo...

Review: Oz: The Great and Powerful

James Franco stars as Oscar (AKA ‘Oz), a shonky but likeable magician/con man working the Kansas beat when his quick escape plan via hot-air balloon during a tornado goes awry- funnily enough due to the frigging tornado. He finds himself having been transported to the land of Oz, where everyone thankfully has a colour TV. There he encounters a talking monkey (voiced by Zach Braff), and a witch named Theodora (Mila Kunis), who believes he is the prophesised rightful ruler of Oz. Theodora’s sister Evanora (Rachel Weisz), however, says that in order for the prophecy to be truly fulfilled, he must first kill the Wicked Witch of the South. But when he finds this witch, named Glinda (Michelle Williams), who is both beautiful and the embodiment of goodness, Oz begins to see the other two bitch...er...witches in a completely different light, especially when one of them turns a bit green (Sure to piss feminists off, too). Veteran character actor Bill Cobbs turns up as the Master Tinker, whi...

Review: Oblivion

60 years ago, an alien invasion left the Earth looking like Chernobyl and now seriously underpopulated. We won the war, but it sure as shit doesn’t look like it. Whilst most of the human survivors are now on one of Saturn’s moons, Tom Cruise and his absolutely stunning mission partner Andrea Riseborough have quite possibly the dullest job in the world, overseeing Earth, and maintaining drones and watching out for the few alien scavengers still hanging around. It’s near the end of their mission, but it’s not like they have any fond memories or anything, because their memories are actually wiped before the start of their mission. So why is Cruise dreaming of the beautiful Olga Kurylenko, dreams that seem awfully like memories that he can’t quite comprehend? A creepy Melissa Leo plays the pair’s no-nonsense remote commander, Morgan Freeman turns up as a cigar-chomping leader of a human résistance still on Earth. An underused Nikolaj Coster-Waldau is also a part of Freeman’s crew. ...

Review: Murder By Numbers

Sandra Bullock plays a hardened homicide detective with a very dark past, who along with new partner Ben Chaplin is investigating the murder of a young woman. The prime suspects are disaffected and probably insufficiently supervised high schoolers Ryan Gosling (socially adept and popular) and Michael Pitt (shy and bookish). The audience knows they’re guilty, these two teens from different social circles have come together to perform what intellectual Pitt sees as the ‘perfect crime’. Yet, to Bullock’s consternation, her superior (R.D. Call) wants her to focus more on the local janitor (Chris Penn), who sells drugs to students. But Bullock persists in her pursuit of the two teens, perhaps with a little too much aggressiveness. Agnes Bruckner plays a fellow student who finds Gosling revolting but is nicer to the more chivalrous Pitt (Something that seems to make Gosling go all Leopold and Loeb-like jealous).   Oh if only this film were as smart, interesting and creative as ...