Popcorn? Check. 3-D glasses? Check. A theatre full of whining, hyperactive kids? Check. Low expectations? Check. Alright, Uncle Walt – show me what you got!

Enter Milo. Like most pre-teens, he has a hard life. He’s forced to take out the garbage, eat broccoli, and do all sorts of unpleasant, demeaning things on a daily basis by an evil suburban dictator: his mother. One night, after a particularly troublesome skirmish, he [...]

Matthew McConaughey is back playing a defence attorney, fifteen years after the John Grisham adaptation A Time to Kill. But his earnest, cleancut persona in that film has been ditched in favour of a charismatic but morally dubious sleazeball in The Lincoln Lawyer. As the numberplate on his gargantuan car/mobile office (the “Lincoln” of the title) testifies, any client who signs on with him is all but guaranteed a final [...]

With An Inconvenient Truth in 2007, director Davis Guggenheim brought the pressing issue of global warming to the big screen, winning an Oscar and proving that Michael Moore wasn’t the only documentary filmmaker who could bring in a crowd. Waiting for “Superman” is a similarly sobering experience, in which he asks us again to face up to our responsibilities – not to Mother Earth this time, but to our children.

Rango may just be the first animated Western/comedy with a cast of characters made up entirely of animals. In fact, I’m sure of it. But does it stand out from the recent deluge of computer animation on the big screen? You can breathe a sigh of relief, because it certainly does. And you won’t be made to wrap a crappy pair of 3-D glasses around your face to enjoy it [...]

What do you do when your man checks out other women whenever you’re out with him? How do you respond to a guy who has romantic sessions – by himself – in the car after you turn out the light? Put him on a leash? Cut your losses and move on? No – you give him a hall pass. And if you’re not sure he knows what to do with [...]

Last year’s Up in the Air was about a guy who fired people for a living. We watched scene after uncomfortable scene of former employees reacting with shock, disbelief and indignation when they are bluntly told that their years of service and sacrifice have reached a premature end. Since the main character, played by charismatic star George Clooney, held all the power, there was [...]

If the term “arthouse” usually makes you cringe, or if you find it a bit challenging trying to keep up with subtitles on the big screen, you’d better stop reading this and see what else is playing this week. Certified Copy is one of those intellectual foreign films (gasp) where characters’ motives remain obscure, nothing actually happens, and they spew so much philosophy at the camera that you’ll be wiping [...]

We’ve seen plenty of films about high school shootings (most notoriously Gus Van Sant’s Elephant) and young students sacrificed by their own ruthless chain of command, from Lord of the Flies [1963] to Bully [2001]. In Wasted on the Young, the debut feature from Australian writer/director Ben C. Lucas, we get a modern take on this controversial subject — even the most ruthless of bullies is computer-literate these days.