Few films arrive as burdened by expectation as Prometheus, Ridley Scott’s eagerly awaited prequel to his 1979 space horror flick Alien. Though it can’t live up to the years of hype, Prometheus is the most interesting sort of failure and the most glorious sort of mess because it sets its sights high. Prometheus is
Browsing: Weekend
Perhaps it’s wrong to hate Call of Duty for being the world’s biggest first-person shooter (FPS), but sometimes it’s hard not to. Activision’s multibillion-dollar juggernaut has turned into a homogenising force in the military shooter market as other publishers try to emulate its success. Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon
Max Payne, first released in 2001, pointed the way to the future of the third-person shooter more than any other game released 10 years ago. Drawing on Hollywood realism as much as videogame convention and propelled as much by narrative as gameplay, it was the granddaddy of Uncharted, Gears of War
Diablo 3, just like 2010’s StarCraft 2, is the product of a studio that has settled into a conservative middle-age, one that has perhaps become hostage to a fan base that is suspicious of innovation. One might wonder what Blizzard Entertainment might achieve with more
Battleship is big, dumb, witless, and cynically slapped together. It is also entertaining in the fashion of a film that you laugh at rather than with. Effectively a US$200m B-movie branded for a classic board game, it is such a grand monument to the worst excesses
Marvel’s master plan for an all-star superhero film with some of its most popular characters has finally come together in The Avengers, a rousing special FX blockbuster that delivers exactly what most comic-book fans will be looking for. It’s an enjoyable
It’s not often that a film director is brave enough to play it straight with a “when animals attack!” movie, but Joe Carnahan’s The Grey is deadly serious about its man versus nature theme and better for it. It’s an efficient creature-feature, made with conviction and gutsiness. The Grey pits a crew of roughneck oil drillers, led by wolf hunter
Boyish rom-com lead Hugh Grant is about as far from a 19th century pirate as you could imagine, but then The Pirate Captain he voices in Aardman’s Pirates! Band of Misfits is not your average scorbutic seadog. Preening, caddish and exceedingly proud of his “luxuriant” beard, The Pirate Captain is every bit the roguish man-child that
The way the world ends in Take Shelter is not in a flash of nuclear light or with the moon turning scarlet, but with lost jobs, mortgage foreclosures and medical insurance co-payments. It’s an apocalyptic thriller for our times, a film about the terrors of a life where there are no more financial certainties. Directed by Jeff Nichols and starring
Is any other film ageing as gracefully as The Godfather, which celebrated its 40th anniversary in March this year? Francis Ford Coppola’s mafia saga is as compelling now as it was then, a film that perfectly fuses a director’s personal vision with epic themes and that effortlessly reconciles artistic flair with cracking entertainment. The Godfather is