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
Browsing: Lance Harris
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
A universe in crisis, galaxies in flames, and warfare on an interplanetary scale — and that’s just the fanboy fallout about the way that Bioware brings its space opera Mass Effect 3 to an end. The game itself goes to even darker places and plays for higher stakes
Journey lasts just two to three hours, but it will turn out to be one of the most memorable gaming adventures you will experience this year. The new PlayStation 3 exclusive from thatgamecompany (TGC) is an enigmatic parable and a meditative mood poem in video-game form — a game that taps into parts of the human experience
Tomas Alfredson’s cinematic adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy immerses itself in the murkiness and gloom of John le Carré’s Cold War novels. Dense, deliberate and cerebral, it is as fine a movie made from a Le Carré novel as we have seen since The Spy Who Came in from the Cold in 1964
Dave Brown, the booze, pill and testosterone-fuelled antihero of Rampart, is one of the filthiest cops we’ve ever seen on screen — thuggish like Russell Crowe’s Bud White in LA Confidential, more unhinged than Harvey Keitel’s Bad Lieutenant, and as shamelessly decadent as Denzel Washington in Training Day
Near the beginning of the 1950s, when Singin’ in the Rain and Sunset Boulevard reflected on the transition from silent films to talkies, Hollywood was giving voice to its terror of television as much as it was lamenting the loss of the past. The Artist and other big Oscar winners this year echo the themes of wrenching technology
The Darkness 2 is intoxicated with its cartoonish, well, darkness. It revels in its demonic imagery and showers of bloody gibs in the way that the first-person shooter (FPS) did back in the adolescence of the Quake years. Don’t be deceived by the nods it makes
There’s more than a whiff of déjà vu in Safe House. With the graininess of every frame, the overuse of handheld shaky cam in the action scenes, and the presence of Denzel Washington as a hard-nosed government agent, you’d be forgiven for mistaking it for a Tony Scott film. As much as Safe House
Director Alexander Payne was once the movies’ most acerbic observer of middle-aged masculinity. He has gone soft with his Oscar-baiting drama The Descendants, a slick but manipulative look at the trials a family endures after the mother is injured in a boating accident that puts her