Film Review
Carnage
Director: Roman Polanski
Cast: Jodie Foster, Kate Winslet, John C.Reilly & Christoph Waltz
Certificate: 15a
Running Time: 78 minutes…
There’s always been a problem with watching a movie based on a play. It’s glaringly obvious you’re watching a play. You can dress it with elaborate sets and locations, garnish it with evocative orchestral scores or
J. Edgar
Director: Clint Eastwood
Cast: Leonardo Di Caprio, Armie Hammer, Naomi Watts, Judi Dench
Certificate: 12a
Running Time: 137 minutes
…
Prohibition, World War 2, the Lindenburg baby, John Dillinger, Machine Gun Kelly, cross-dressing, JFK’s assassination and the birth of the FBI. The life and career of J.Edgar Hoover is so rich with content that any one
Shame
Director: Steve McQueen
Cast:Carey Mulligan, Michael Fassbender
Cert: 18
Running Time: 99 min
…
An average man thinks of sex every seven seconds. Or is it every three minutes? Though the details tend to vary, we’ve all heard the adage revealing mans active cerebral sex life. And like so many old clichés, it’s completely unfounded. But
State’s top 15 films of 2011
We have a small pool of film writers at State so compiling this list was a lot easier than collating the 40 people who submitted to the top albums of 2011 list. Our intention here is to represent a tasty selection of films you may have missed if you didn’t got the cinema as regularly…
50/50
Director: Jonathan Levine
Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Seth Rogen, Anna Kendrick, Bryce Dallas Howard and Anjelica Huston
Cert: 15a
Running Time: 100 minutes
…
When it comes to comedy topics, cancer probably ranks somewhere at the bottom along with incest, pedophilia and rape. Subjects that are normally a no-go zone for laughs. Unless your name happens to
The Deep Blue Sea
Straight from its swelling, melodramatic, orchestral opening scenes, the sense of romance and true love as heightened by Terence Davies’ meticulous treatment of Terence Rattigan’s celebrated stage play leaves us in no doubt as to what we are about to witness. Namely, the slow unwinding of love and love-lost by post-war lamplight.
Rachel Weisz (excellent)…
The Awakening
Rebecca Hall is Florence Cathcart a post World War One London-based hoax-exposer. Of high education (Cambridge) and fame (her widely read books) she’s also, you would imagine at any rate, very much the Suffragette. She’s independent, skeptic and very much her own woman.
Then war wounded Robert Mallory (Dominic West – solid) comes calling from…
Justice
A couple of things. No, actually, just one thing. Justice is a terrible movie. Journeyman director Roger Donaldson has made some perfectly watchable pictures, Thirteen Days and The World’s Fastest Indian being two recent examples. But with Justice… he has taken a serious misstep from his usual ordinary, yet satisfying formula.
Co-produced – trivia fans
Moneyball
This based-on-a-true-story drama gives Brad Pitt his most satisfying role in years and is a worthy addition to the canon of sports movies and its deserving sub-category – baseball movies.
Pitt plays Billy Beane, General Manager of the Oakland Athletics. A Major-League baseball team, but think more Blackburn Rovers than Manchester United. Bean didn’t match…
Miss Bala
Director: Gerardo Naranjo
Cast: Stephanie Sigman, Noe Hernandez
Cert: 15a
Running Time: 113 minutes
If there’s one thing that we’ve learned from Walter White’s skirmishes with the cartel in Breaking Bad…, it’s that they’re a right brutal, bad bunch of bastards. Director Gerardo Naranjo is probably inclined to agree, although maybe doesn’t share the
The Help
The Help…, a debut novel by Kathryn Stockett (with a “not bad” five million copies sold to date) was published in February 2009. By the end of that year Chris Columbus’ 1492 pictures (early Harry Potter films – amongst others) had snapped up the film adaptation and here we have it. A typical mainstream
The Adventures of Tintin: Secret Of The Unicorn
Director: Steven Spielberg
Cast: Jamie Bell, Andy Serkis, Daniel Craig, Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Toby Jones
Running time: 107 minutes
Certificate: PG…
The first Tintin movie was always going to be a big film, it had to be. After all, it’s only backed by the two most successful producers of all time in Steven Spielberg
Contagion
Stephen Soderbergh’s admiral versatility, his chameleon ability to flit from form to form, high to low budget, genre to genre, means expectations of his next deliverance are always slightly askew. What will be the next Sodernergh incarnation, what direction will he blow, is he wearing a hat? A non-sequitur yes, but a little like his…
Real Steel
There is a placid opening to Real Steel…. It’s Americana hue; wide-open vistas, the open road, country fairs in the middle of nowhere; old-fashioned Mum and apple pie and robot boxing rodeos…wait a second?
It’s the not too distant future (2020 to be exact) and Hugh Jackman is Charlie Kenton, an ex-boxer for whom
