Australia

Australia

I love epics. Grand sweeping shots of beautiful landscape, stories spanning decades, characters larger than life. I rarely mind the runtime and I love just sitting down on a Sunday afternoon to watch a three- or four-hour movie. Lawrence of Arabia is among my favourite movies ever.
Australia though, was just a little too much. Baz [...]

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Rachel Getting Married

Rachel Getting Married

Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) is getting married, and her sister Kym (Anne Hathaway) is out of rehab for the occasion. Kym’s appearance throws her family into disarray, and everyone is forced to deal with various problems simmering under the surface. Sounds good? It’s really not.
The IMDb synopsis says that the movie “paints a colorful, nuanced family [...]

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Changeling

Changeling

Clint Eastwood has really become one of the best directors working in Hollywood today. He seems to have a thorough understanding of what works and how to simply tell a story without any overbearing moral lessons or special effects. His movies are subtle, and thoughtful, and really solid. The script was written by J. Michael [...]

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Surveillance

Surveillance

Surveillance is a new thriller starring Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond. It’s directed by Jennifer Chambers Lynch (daughter of director David Lynch).
Two FBI agents (Pullman, Ormond) arrive in a small town in the middle of nowhere to help catch a serial killer. The movie plays out mostly in the police station as they interrogate three [...]

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Hunger

Hunger

Hunger relays the true story of the 1981 IRA hunger strike in Northern Ireland. Lead by Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender), this was a strike carried out by the prisoners of the Maze prison in an effort to win political status. It dramatises the events in the prison in the six weeks leading up to Sands’ [...]

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Tokyo!

Tokyo!

To say that Tokyo! is a strange concoction would be to undersell it quite a bit. Three directors here present their own, separate, forty-minute segments — and they’re all inventive and a little bit crazy.
Michel Gondry’s Interior Design is about a young couple having just moved to Tokyo. He is an aspiring filmmaker, she seems [...]

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Adoration

Adoration

Adoration is the latest from Canadian director Atom Egoyan. It tells the story of a young man called Simon (Devon Bostick), an orphan who lives with his uncle (Scott Speedman). One day, Simon’s French teacher reads an old newspaper article to the class, for them to translate. It’s about a man who planted a bomb [...]

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W.

W.

Oliver Stone has always been hit-and-miss with me. Sometimes he’s brilliant (JFK, Platoon), but sometimes he gives us the worst movie of the year (Alexander). Regardless of the end result though, he always seems to put his heart and soul into any project.
This hit-and-miss aspect of Stone’s career is distilled into W., the movie about [...]

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Happy-Go-Lucky

Happy-Go-Lucky

Poppy (Sally Hawkins) is a cheerful kind of person. Insanely cheerful. Nothing can get Poppy down. She goes through life with a smile on her lips and open arms.
Before seeing this movie, I had heard that some people find Poppy annoying. Being a rather cynical person myself, I was worried I would too. I needn’t [...]

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Henry Poole Is Here

Henry Poole Is Here

Henry Poole (Luke Wilson) is dying. He abandons his old life and moves into a house in the street where he grew up. He eats only pizza and donuts, and drinks vodka. Lots and lots of vodka.
One day, his nosy neighbour Esperanza (Adriana Barraza) discovers a water stain on the side of Henry’s house which [...]

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The Brothers Bloom

The Brothers Bloom

The Brothers Bloom is Rian Johnson’s follow-up to 2005’s brilliant high school noir Brick. Personally, I couldn’t wait to see what Johnson would do next. What he has done is take on the conman subgenre, and weaved it into a rich and very entertaining romp about two brothers.
The movie is about Bloom (Adrien Brody) and [...]

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