This year, we’ve seen superheroes, aliens and boy wizards explode onto the big screen, but where have all the real action movies been? I’m talking about the ones featuring people, not pixels. The ones where the actor dangles perilously from the world’s tallest building, and not from a wire in front the world’s widest green screen. What happened to those action movies? Don’t they get made any more?

Well, it turns [...]

A timely tale of disenchanted youth and criminal culture set against a sci-fi genre backdrop, Attack the Block is a fresh, energetic, spectacularly original and wildly entertaining debut feature film full of wit, suspense, action, terrific characters, awesome monsters and a totally bad-ass score. Written and directed by English comedian Joe Cornish (who also co-wrote the recent Steven Spielberg directed Tintin movie), the film sees a gang of south London [...]

Bennett Miller’s Moneyball is not like most other sports movies. In most sports movies, no matter which game they concern, the drama takes place in the arena – on the basketball court and the football field, in the boxing ring and the baseball diamond. It is there that muscular athletes conquer pain, adversity and inevitably sharp odds to steal victory (or occasionally suffer honourable defeats) in front of lights, cameras, [...]

Eddie Murphy has been stealing from the pockets of moviegoers for over a decade now – how else would you describe the experience of watching Pluto Nash or Imagine That? – so it’s not without a sense of irony that he gives his best performances in years as a petty thief in Tower Heist. Murphy not only steals scenes from his co-star Ben Stiller, he actually [...]

As Julia Leigh’s ponderously pretentious Sleeping Beauty attested earlier this year, art films dealing with the sex trade have a nasty habit of being the kind of movies that scream: “look at how shocking and subversive I am!”

Thankfully, J. Harkness’ Birthday screams no such things. Sure, this chastening look into the loveless lives of prostitutes and their clientele might have lost a thing or two in translation from stage to [...]

Ages of Love is the third part in the Italian “Manuel of Love” trilogy, and is itself made up of three separate chapters. These segments, christened “youth”, “maturity” and “beyond”, overlap and intertwin, as men and woman all over the Italian capital flirt and fornicate under the sparkling eyes of a taxi-driving, vest-wearing cupid. And it is truly appalling. Styled by its Australian marketers as an Italian Love, Actually, and [...]

A first-class tale of political intrigue, The Ides of March offers a glimmer of hope to those people fed-up with the state of American politics, only to dash those hopes upon the jagged rocks of ambition, secrecy and betrayal. The story, based on the play Farragut North by Beau Willimon, concerns an idealistic junior campaign manager who gets a crash course in pragmatism when he discovers the man he is [...]

Whilst adults are busy pondering the meaning of life, kids have been losing sleep over a far more pressing question: how can a single man deliver billions of presents in a single night? Well, with plenty of wit and perhaps a bit of insider knowledge, Britain’s Aardman Animations (Chicken Run, Wallace & Gromit) have come up with a cracker of an answer: all it takes is a gigantic spaceship, an [...]