The Expendables, Sylvester Stallone’s attempt to round up the great action stars of the 1980s for a last hurrah, sounded fantastic on paper but fell flat in execution. With the sequel, Sly and his friends from the Beverly Hills Home for Retired Action Heroes set things right by giving us the Dirty Dozen-style ensemble action film for
Browsing: Weekend
Things didn’t look particularly good for Sleeping Dogs just a year and a half ago when the game was brutally cancelled by Activision because it was “just not good enough” to compete with the Grand Theft Autos of the world. Saving the game from oblivion
By the heady standards of Alfred Hitchcock, his 1958 film Vertigo was a failure. It only just broke even at the box office at a time when the director’s films where raking in money. It received a lukewarm reception from the critics, who sniffed that it was “only a murder mystery” not worthy of two hours of screen time. Those same critics
For a film of its name, Pixar’s Brave feels positively timid. Though touted as a breakthrough for Pixar and the wider animation industry — it’s the animation studio’s first film co-directed by a woman and to feature a female lead character — Brave is as conventional as a Disney fairy tale. That’s not to say that
Few films leave me as conflicted as The Dark Knight Rises, the ambitious but maddeningly inconsistent conclusion to the trilogy director Christopher Nolan started with Batman Begins. It’s a film that as often amplifies Nolan’s weaknesses as a storyteller as it
The slasher flick has not been the same since Wes Craven’s 1996 horror-comedy Scream so cannily deconstructed the subgenre that he helped to create. Craven’s mockery was affectionate but also so on target that no one has been able to take slasher movies seriously ever since
Following too soon after Sam Raimi’s 2002 Spider-Man origin tale and sticking too closely to its narrative beat, The Amazing Spider-Man has no real reason to exist. Though the film is often enjoyable, it’s hard to shake the feeling you have seen it all before in Raimi’s film and countless other superhero origin
Willed into existence in one of the world’s most barren places, the gleaming towers of Dubai are a monument to the triumphs of the age and perhaps to its hubris. Fast-forwarded from the “18th century to the 21st in a single generation”, it is a city that stands defiant against the arid wasteland that surrounds it
The Woman in Black, an Edwardian period horror film starring Daniel Radcliffe, is so thick with foggy atmosphere that you almost miss the faint whiff of the ridiculous in the air. This is a film that considers no haunted house cliché too threadbare to use, but that manages to be chilling despite the familiarity of
Indie Game: the Movie, one of the most talked-about films at the Sundance Festival earlier this year, is a rabidly partisan look at the tribulations and triumphs of indie games developers. Romanticising its subjects as the 21st century’s struggling artists, it