Review – 12 Years a Slave
When we first meet Solomon (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor) he is a skilled fiddle player with a wife and family, but by a ruse he finds himself drugged, chained, and sold to slavers.
Category: Cinema
Review – The Wolf of Wall Street
The Wolf of Wall Street is not a warts-and-all portrayal of Wall Street vice but is, at its core, an uninteresting brush-up of a man who has already received too much attention.
Review – 47 Ronin
Luckily [47 Ronin] doesn’t fall at every hurdle. The set pieces and period costumes are absolutely gorgeous, the cinematography is quietly beautiful, and there is an undercurrent of mysticism to this picture which is both subtle and entrancing.
Review – The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
Fans should be very happy with this film with how some classic scenes from the novel have been realised by Jackson’s skilful direction, and Bilbo’s encounter with Smaug is sure to be thrilling for the die-hards and casual cinema-goers alike.
Review – American Hustle
Let me begin by saying that I found Silver Linings Playbook overhyped and underwhelming which is why I went into David O Russell’s follow-up American Hustle with a touch of trepidation.
Review – The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
Catching Fire, the long-awaited sequel to Hunger Games, is a startling film to come out of Hollywood. It is both spectacular and exhilarating… but it is also just so relentlessly fucking bleak.
Review – Ender’s Game
At its best, Ender’s Game has some gorgeous visuals that are well integrated into the story… outside of that, though, there’s not a lot to recommend this film as a cinematic experience.
Review – Night Train to Lisbon
This film unfolds like a literary procedural, and here I mean literary as opposed to being cinematic.
Review – Made in SA
It is hard not to walk away from this film in awe of… home-grown SA talent in the field.
Review – Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa
Steve Coogan brings his much loved character Alan Partridge to the big screen in an over-the-top and downright bizarre comedy that flirts brilliantly and hilariously with bad taste.
Review – Machete Kills
The breasts and violence are toned down to accommodate a more outrageous storyline and new characters that push this sequel closer to comedy than its predecessor.
Review – Cosimo and Nicole
Boy meets girl. Girl and boy fall in love. Bad thing happens. Love is tested. Audience rapidly loses interest in film.
Review – Every Blessed Day
Every Blessed Day is a love story, and a sweet little one at that, about the trials and melodrama of an ongoing relationship.
Review – The Red and the Blue
Whoever said that all high-school dramas ought to be damming, finger-jabbing films with moral outrage and deep-seeded messages? Is it really such a crime to make a simple film that tells a story, without trying to convince everyone to light up some torches, grab a few pitchforks and rage against the machine?
Review – The Human Cargo
There’s a disarming ‘what were we thinking?’ nature to some of that interview footage, crisp and HD as it is against the grainy and immediate, unfiltered news footage of the time. But it is the latter, the incredible archive stuff spun towards us with a wild metal soundtrack at times, that is the real core of this work.
