Location: Melbourne, Victoria
Favourite Films: Network [1976], United 93 [2006], Memento [2000], Terminator 2: Judgement Day [1991], Kill Bill Volume 1 & 2 [2003-2004]
Favourite Genres: Crime, Action, Drama
Favourite Directors: Stanley Kubrick, Christopher Nolan, Sidney Lumet
Other Interests: TV, Travel, Australian Rules Football
Tom Clift conned his way into a gig at Movidex covering the 2011 Melbourne International Film Festival, and has been bumming around the joint ever since. He’s currently working towards completing his Bachelor of Arts at the University of Melbourne, with a double major in Cinema & Cultural Studies and Media & Communications. He’s also the treasurer of the Melbourne University Film Society, and a screen editor for Farrago, the Universities student run magazine. When he’s not watching movies, writing reviews or tweeting incessantly about very little, he can be found trawling the comments sections of Rotten Tomatoes taking the opinions of internet trolls more personally than is probably healthy.
All posts by Tom:
Tom Cruise (Mission Impossible) brings a blunt edge to the title hero of Christopher McQuarrie’s Jack Reacher, a gripping old-school crime thriller about a five-person homicide, and the brilliant military investigator tasked with bringing its orchestrator’s to justice. Adapted from Lee Child’s One Shot – the ninth book in his popular Jack Reacher series– the film begins with one of the best directed sequences of the year, before spinning [...]
Super powered heroes join forces to combat a nefarious enemy. No, it’s not Marvel’s The Avengers, but rather DreamWorks Animation’s Rise of the Guardians, a candy coloured children’s adventure film that re-imagines The Tooth Fairy, Sandman, The Easter Bunny, Jack Frost and Santa Claus as a rag-tag team of crime fighting vigilantes tasked with protecting the world’s children from the things that go bump in the night. But while [...]
Wu-Tang Clan front man RZA tries his hand at movie-making with The Man with the Iron Fists, an homage-sploitative throwback to the Chinese wuxia films that have long been an influence on his music. Co-written by Hostel director Eli Roth, and bearing the “presented by” seal of approval from Quentin Tarantino, the film tells the story of several warring martial arts clans in nineteenth century China, and the various colourful [...]
From James Dean to John Hughes to vampires sparkling in the sun, adolescent angst has long been a big draw at the box office. The horrors of high school are after all a fairly universal experience, particularly for the kinds of kids drawn to Smith’s records, B-movies and books like Catcher in the Rye, all of which play a big part in the coming-of-age of Charlie (Logan Lerman; The [...]
Fifty years in, it’s safe to say that the James Bond franchise has been a fun but very mixed bag. Indeed, you only have to look at the past two films to see how drastically these movies can vary in quality; Casino Royale – stylish, dramatic and loaded with action – reinvigorated the character and brought him racing into the twenty-first century, only for him to flounder just two years later [...]
Walking out of Miss Bala after it screened at this year’s Sydney Film Festival, two things stood out in my mind. The first was the beautiful camera work. The second was the staggering lead performance. Loosely based on the experiences of a real life Miss Hispanic America, Gerardo Naranjo’s film tells the tale of a beauty pageant contestant caught up for three harrowing days in the brutal Mexican drug war. [...]
