In a Filipino slum, a desperate mother fights back tears as she chaperones her daughter to the doorstep of an elderly Caucasian man, ready to make a transaction that she’ll forever regret. This sequence, preceded by a child publicly defecating in the street, is the very definition of poverty porn, almost to the point where you expect to see UNICEF listed in the production credits.

Redeemably, however, the above sequence invites [...]

Pink Floyd called it: there’s something on the dark side of the moon, and it’s not Michael Bay’s Transformers. No, we’re talking Moon Nazis; Astral Aryans who have spent the last few decades developing a final solution they hope to be, well, much more final than their last one.

That’s the zany conceit fuelling Timo Vuorensola’s sci-fi sendup Iron Sky; a Finnish, German and Australian co-production that strips Star Wars of [...]

From the opening scene, in which lead character Swanson (Tim Heidecker) describes in detail the effects of an anal prolapse before insulting the sexuality of the male nurse whose job it is to take care of his barely breathing invalid father, Rick Alverson’s new film does everything it can to be as aggressively alienating as humanly possible. An ugly tale of a fat, over-privileged, middle-aged New York hipster stuck in [...]

Man on a Ledge is a fairly apt title for what is, undeniably, a movie about a man on a ledge. But given that it stars action drone Sam Worthington, you’ll be wishing they called it Man off a Ledge before long.

Here I thought Hollywood was well aware of the limited range of Worthington, having restricted him in the past to roles that don’t require much emoting, such as playing [...]

Any ghost story that claims to be “based on a true story” is already fighting an uphill battle, but when it’s as middling and generic as Pat Holden’s When the Lights Went Out, it’s even easier to dismiss. A stock standard haunted house story, the film follows an English family who experience paranormal disturbances upon settling in to a new home. Although not entirely lacking in creepy images or suspense, [...]

A gangster movie out of Iceland, Black’s Game [Svartur-Leik] was executive produced by Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn. As such, comparisons to his recent Drive — the best film of last year — are inevitable and perhaps not unwarranted. Both films are unashamed in their attempts to make every frame as cool as humanly possible. But while Drive employed ice-cold restraint and was a success, Black’s Game goes the [...]

“All it takes for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing”. Never has this famous saying been truer than in the case of the brutal stabbing murder of Kitty Genovese in New York in 1964, a crime that occurred within earshot of thirty-eight people, none of whom lifted a finger to prevent it. A grim indictment of human cowardice and apathy, the case has been referenced and [...]

If ever there was a movie made for movie critics, it is Hugo. Directed by Martin Scorsese (Shutter Island), the film, based on the children’s book by Brian Selznick, is on its surface a bright and colourful 3D fantasy about a Parisian orphan boy in the 1930s, whose friendship with the granddaughter of an enigmatic toy-shop owner yields secrets about his own relationship with his father. But peel back [...]