life is cheap

Civil War

Why Civil War? Alex Garland’s thing as a writer and sometimes director seems to be high-concept, high-quality 5-minutes-into-the-future speculations with problematic endings. 28 Days Later, Sunshine, Annihilation – all are dressed up in nice conceptions, vignettes and visualisations but find

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Civil War

Why Civil War? Alex Garland’s thing as a writer and sometimes director seems to be high-concept, high-quality 5-minutes-into-the-future speculations with problematic endings. 28 Days Later, Sunshine, Annihilation – all are dressed up in nice conceptions, vignettes and visualisations but find

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Furiosa

Those enamoured of George Miller’s winning way with physical stunts and effects will find some of their dismay at his adoption of CGI for the Max franchise warranted. Others curious to see how his flair for choreography at high speed

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Furiosa

Those enamoured of George Miller’s winning way with physical stunts and effects will find some of their dismay at his adoption of CGI for the Max franchise warranted. Others curious to see how his flair for choreography at high speed

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Don’t Look Up

Well sure it’s obvious. Sure, there are much better movies to compare it to. Sure, it’s not that funny. But maybe it’s not a comedy. Maybe it’s just a tragedy – a dramatic form contemporary audiences aren’t so familiar with.

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Don’t Look Up

Well sure it’s obvious. Sure, there are much better movies to compare it to. Sure, it’s not that funny. But maybe it’s not a comedy. Maybe it’s just a tragedy – a dramatic form contemporary audiences aren’t so familiar with.

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The Outpost

The Outpost tells the true story of the bloody fall of a remote US army base in Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush mountains. It suffers from problems common to many patriotic war dramas. While the there-but-for-the-grace-of-god moments of mortal terror and nope-not-for-me

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The Outpost

The Outpost tells the true story of the bloody fall of a remote US army base in Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush mountains. It suffers from problems common to many patriotic war dramas. While the there-but-for-the-grace-of-god moments of mortal terror and nope-not-for-me

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I Am Mother

Until a recent general improvement in story output, the problem with many Netflix productions seemed to be an eschewing of rigorous script assessment, likely attributable to the subscription model prioritising quantity over quality. I Am Mother, a Netflix production from 2018,

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I Am Mother

Until a recent general improvement in story output, the problem with many Netflix productions seemed to be an eschewing of rigorous script assessment, likely attributable to the subscription model prioritising quantity over quality. I Am Mother, a Netflix production from 2018,

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It Follows

How did this happen? Its like someone, while absently pondering mash-ups of horror sub-genres, put The Ring’s pass-it-on curse next to Halloween’s teenage body count and stumbled upon a Tutankhamun’s tomb of treasures. It Follows‘s simple premise of sexually transmitted

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It Follows

How did this happen? Its like someone, while absently pondering mash-ups of horror sub-genres, put The Ring’s pass-it-on curse next to Halloween’s teenage body count and stumbled upon a Tutankhamun’s tomb of treasures. It Follows‘s simple premise of sexually transmitted

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The Florida Project

A more-than-you-can-eat pizza-slice of life, hot from the florid state – more specifically Orlando. It’s a short walk from Disneyland but a long, alligator-infested way downstream. The Florida Project features one of the most striking child performances in recent memory

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The Florida Project

A more-than-you-can-eat pizza-slice of life, hot from the florid state – more specifically Orlando. It’s a short walk from Disneyland but a long, alligator-infested way downstream. The Florida Project features one of the most striking child performances in recent memory

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Wheelman

The vaguely familiar Frank Grillo makes a classy and economical pitch at booting a Stallone/Van-Damme/Strachan tough-guy franchise. Director-writer Jeremy Rush has mashed Locke with Driver. As a car-chase movie, like nearly every car-chase movie other than Bullitt, it’s a fail. It

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Wheelman

The vaguely familiar Frank Grillo makes a classy and economical pitch at booting a Stallone/Van-Damme/Strachan tough-guy franchise. Director-writer Jeremy Rush has mashed Locke with Driver. As a car-chase movie, like nearly every car-chase movie other than Bullitt, it’s a fail. It

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Blade Runner 2049

Deckhard is back, Hampton Fancher is back, the rain is back, as is some of the neon, albeit faded behind some kind of airborne filth with lumps in it. Blade Runner in the eighties was a world crippled and depressed

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Blade Runner 2049

Deckhard is back, Hampton Fancher is back, the rain is back, as is some of the neon, albeit faded behind some kind of airborne filth with lumps in it. Blade Runner in the eighties was a world crippled and depressed

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Nightcrawler

Nightcrawler crawls over the line where news eats itself, not just blurring the report and the reporter but selling a kind of news that is self-creating, like reality television, with hapless unpaid actors forced to play out scenarios of some network

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Nightcrawler

Nightcrawler crawls over the line where news eats itself, not just blurring the report and the reporter but selling a kind of news that is self-creating, like reality television, with hapless unpaid actors forced to play out scenarios of some network

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Ghost In The Shell

A remake of the 1995 anime. That film’s story about semi-outlaw cyber cops chasing a rogue entity that has evolved out of the internet has been dispensed with for an episode of Find My Family, with lashings of chop socky in

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Ghost In The Shell

A remake of the 1995 anime. That film’s story about semi-outlaw cyber cops chasing a rogue entity that has evolved out of the internet has been dispensed with for an episode of Find My Family, with lashings of chop socky in

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Sicario

As Sicario overplays its quest to underplay itself, we arrive at a confused portrait of profound dysfunction. That may be an appropriate angle to take on another of America’s unwinnable wars (in this case the drugs and border war with Mexico),

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Sicario

As Sicario overplays its quest to underplay itself, we arrive at a confused portrait of profound dysfunction. That may be an appropriate angle to take on another of America’s unwinnable wars (in this case the drugs and border war with Mexico),

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Mad Max : Fury Road

Max is back. The story hits the road early and stays there. The elevator pitch might be “Ellen Ripley vs Boko Haram on wheels”, with Max as the benevolent Michael Biehn or Lance Henriksen character. Since the second instalment the

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Mad Max : Fury Road

Max is back. The story hits the road early and stays there. The elevator pitch might be “Ellen Ripley vs Boko Haram on wheels”, with Max as the benevolent Michael Biehn or Lance Henriksen character. Since the second instalment the

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Noah

God gets a bad rap in Noah, as Darren Aronofsky tries to construe a story that makes no physical, psychological or moral sense. A brood of hapless humans is disgorged out onto what looks like a barren coalfield with no recourse

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Noah

God gets a bad rap in Noah, as Darren Aronofsky tries to construe a story that makes no physical, psychological or moral sense. A brood of hapless humans is disgorged out onto what looks like a barren coalfield with no recourse

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Elysium

Another film about the rich seeking to purge themselves of the poor, taking their bat and baubles and exclusive health care and going home, or in this case moving to an orbiting space station. It’s a disappointing second outing for

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Elysium

Another film about the rich seeking to purge themselves of the poor, taking their bat and baubles and exclusive health care and going home, or in this case moving to an orbiting space station. It’s a disappointing second outing for

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Les Miserables

With every line sung rather than spoken and much of it internal monologue rather than dialogue, Les Miserables and musicals like it redraw the rules of what is cinematically permissible. Melodrama flourishes while realism diminishes in value almost entirely. In

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Les Miserables

With every line sung rather than spoken and much of it internal monologue rather than dialogue, Les Miserables and musicals like it redraw the rules of what is cinematically permissible. Melodrama flourishes while realism diminishes in value almost entirely. In

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Killing Them Softly

Director Andrew Dominick does a creditable job treading some very familiar territory, as weary hit man Brad Pitt tidies up the aftermath of a poker robbery.  The right people die and the ledger is balanced. Pitt’s reaper manages to intrigue with

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Killing Them Softly

Director Andrew Dominick does a creditable job treading some very familiar territory, as weary hit man Brad Pitt tidies up the aftermath of a poker robbery.  The right people die and the ledger is balanced. Pitt’s reaper manages to intrigue with

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Heaven’s Gate (1980)

The literally sprawling epic that made cinema history for all the wrong reasons, raping the coffers of United Artists so resoundingly it made directorial freedom look like a bad thing. Rightly pariahed for its indulgences and cavalier discipline, Heaven’s Gate

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Heaven’s Gate (1980)

The literally sprawling epic that made cinema history for all the wrong reasons, raping the coffers of United Artists so resoundingly it made directorial freedom look like a bad thing. Rightly pariahed for its indulgences and cavalier discipline, Heaven’s Gate

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The Raid

Somewhere in Jakarta, a bunch of rookie SWAT cops find they’ve bitten off more than they can chew in attacking an apartment block full of murderous crims. It shouldn’t have been hard to make that work, but a smart, efficient,

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The Raid

Somewhere in Jakarta, a bunch of rookie SWAT cops find they’ve bitten off more than they can chew in attacking an apartment block full of murderous crims. It shouldn’t have been hard to make that work, but a smart, efficient,

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X

Direction outshines story as Jon Hewitt produces another genre vs art house mashup that works really well bar an action scramble near the end to tie up the plot at the expense of its themes. The unstoppable baddy resembles a

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X

Direction outshines story as Jon Hewitt produces another genre vs art house mashup that works really well bar an action scramble near the end to tie up the plot at the expense of its themes. The unstoppable baddy resembles a

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