I’ve never been much of a gamer. The only time I’ve ever played were one or two abortive attempts at a Super Mario Bros game on my cousins’ television as a clumsy 10-year-old. Yet, even for me, the name of Lara Croft has been ubiquitous. The sex symbol
Browsing: Weekend
The Avengers last year assembled four of Marvel’s biggest heroes in a single film, where an army of aliens led by a Norse god laid utter waste to New York City. That’s a tough act to follow, but Iron Man 3 does so by focusing on the character of Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr) rather than on the superhero firepower
Few topics inspire as much heated debate as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which makes it surprising that the subject should fuel a film as tepid as Promised Land. As much morality tale as green polemic, the film reunites Matt Damon with Good Will Hunting director Gus van Sant after 15 years
Serial killers kill serial killers in Seven Psychopaths, a Hollywood film about an Irish screenwriter in Hollywood written by an Irish screenwriter. It is yet another snarky movie about the movies, a meta-meta-film that borrows liberally from the likes of Quentin Tarantino, Charlie Kaufman and the Coen brothers
Bathed in celestial light, and with the wholesome aroma of carnival popcorn in its air, BioShock Infinite’s airborne city of Columbia is as far from the water-sodden Objectivist dystopia of BioShock in atmosphere as it is in geography. But under its turn-of-the-century fairground Americana, Columbia churns with currents
Bryan Singer directed one of the best films of the 1990s in The Usual Suspects and set the blueprint for cinematic treatments of superheroes with his two Xmen movies. Even his less successful efforts such as The Apt Pupil and Valkyrie are brave, interesting movies that bear the fingerprints of a talented and individual
There are two ways to see Tomb Raider: as a much-needed reinvention of an ageing franchise, or as dumbing down and actioning up of a much-loved series in a sop to the latest fads in a fickle gaming market. It’s a game that is extremely good at what it does
If there’s one lesson to take from The Last Stand – Arnold Schwarzenegger’s big comeback movie – it is that you don’t want to be a bad guy in small town Arizona where the grannies tote shotguns and the village idiot sits on a stockpile of hand cannons and World War 2 machine guns. Few
The utterly joyless and thoroughly vapid Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters easily is the worst in the recent string of modernised olde worlde tales. It handily beats claptrap such as Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and Snow White and the Huntsman for this dubious honour in a subgenre where
Director Kathryn Bigelow did it with The Hurt Locker and she has done it again with Zero Dark Thirty: crafted an awards season-favourite film about the war on terror that has enraged both the American right and the left almost equally. In partisan times, studied neutrality is the most revolutionary