The Place Beyond the Pines announces its ambitiousness with an opening tracking shot so striking that film students will be admiring it for years to come. A shirtless Ryan Gosling, his abdomen tapestried with tattoos, lights a smoke and armours himself in a Metallica T-shirt and leathers as he strides across a
Browsing: Lance Harris
There is a cursory amount of dialogue and plot and perhaps even some human characters doing stuff in Pacific Rim, but who cares? The grown-up voice in your head will find it rather ridiculous, but your inner 10-year-old will be giddy with joy. And if you’re actually 10 years old, this film will probably change your life
After audiences reviled the artsy undertones of Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns in 2006, Man of Steel plays it safe with the most bankable superhero in the DC Comics pantheon. It sets out to deliver the darker, more action-packed Superman film for which fans have clamoured for years, and succeeds in doing just that
Call it the gift of lowered expectations, but zombie apocalypse flick World War Z isn’t as bad as you may have feared following reports of the expensive reshoots and on-set feuds that dogged the production. It’s not genre-redefining like the novel on which it is based, but World War Z delivers enough thrills to make it worth
The early trailers for Star Trek Into Darkness made it look as if the film would be a slog through the generic grimness of all too many 21st century franchise films. In reality, the sequel to the 2009 Star Trek reboot is as breezy and likeable as its predecessor, a film that is hard to hate and even harder to remember once
If director Steven Soderbergh really means to retire from making movies after Side Effects, he leaves Hollywood behind on a high. His latest and supposedly last theatrical feature is Prozac laced with arsenic, a deadly cocktail that courses through the blood like a slow poison. Like many of Soderbergh’s
The most memorable image from Microsoft’s reveal of the Xbox One was an animated German Shepherd with Kevlar armour and a high polygon count. Motion-captured from a retired Navy Seal dog to serve as a player companion in this year’s iteration of Call of Duty, the pooch is an apt mascot for the console. The dog
You’d think that 20 years of progress in computer-generated imagery (CGI) would make Jurassic Park look like, well, a dinosaur. But Steven Spielberg’s summer blockbuster, re-released this weekend with a 3D makeover, is just as captivating and thrilling now as it was in 1993. It remains a great example of the director’s ability
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