Fasten your seatbelts and securely stow your tray tables away: after an extended sabbatical in the uncanny valley, Robert Zemeckis’ first live-action feature in over a decade is taxiing down the runway. The story of an alcoholic pilot thrust into the media spotlight after a heroic crash landing, Flight takes off in incredible style thanks to a jaw-dropping mid-air disaster scene, only to hit turbulence soon after as a result [...]

Contagion by way of Paranormal Activity, director Barry Levinson (Good Morning Vietnam) brings a much needed dose of legitimacy to a generally dismissible found footage sub-genre with The Bay, a horror film that’s as credibly constructed as it is incredibly scary.

Kether Donohue (Pitch Perfect) plays Donna, a journalist-in-training, whose first assignment becomes a nightmare after a beachside community’s Fourth of July celebrations are disrupted by a deadly disease.  [...]

Indie film it-girl Greta Gerwig reteams with her Greenberg director Noah Baumbach for Frances Ha, a low-rent black and white comedy about a directionless New York hipster closing in on the end of her twenties. If such a description makes you cringe then rest assured you’re not alone; films about the plight of the East Coast creative type are in vogue at the moment, typically recognisable by the presence of [...]

Soaked in sweat, booze and a number of other more questionable fluids, Lee Daniel’s follow up to the Oscar nominated Precious is best described as a fascinating train wreck. Based on a novel by Pete Dexter, the film is, at times, a barely comprehensible backwater odyssey, ostensibly about a Florida murder investigation, with lashings of dubious social commentary thrown into the mix. Lewd, ludicrous and utterly convinced of its [...]

Emotional exploitation of the most vile and insensitive kind, The Impossible is an insult to the victims of the tragedy it depicts. Set in the immediate aftermath of the 2004 tsunami which devastated South East Asia, the film makes it abundantly clear that it was in fact the wealthy white people who were the real victims of the disaster, one which left almost a quarter of a million Thais, Indonesians, [...]

The 2012 Fantastic Fest Film Festival closes not with a bang but with a fart, one that reeks of jingoism and all the laziest, mindless and whorish aromas of Hollywood blockbuster filmmaking. The originator of this stench? Dan Bradley’s remake of the 1984 war movie Red Dawn. A tale of American high schoolers who fight back against a nefarious foreign invasion, this contemporary version was actually finished in 2010, only [...]