I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film – live action or animated – quite like Happy Feet Two, and I don’t mean that in a good way. If the original Happy Feet were a whirlwind adventure, this manic sequel is a Category 5 hurricane, the intent being to sweep audiences off their feet, but the result being more  in line with taking a flying brick to the face. Director [...]

The bitter cynic within me — located just left of the pancreas, if we’re being precise — would want nothing more than to rip into the manipulative emotional rollercoaster that is Cameron Crowe’s We Bought a Zoo, the kind of on-rails Hallmark drama where every ascent is followed by a predictable fall. Yet preventing such a scathing report is my inner romantic, a resident of the heart who shows up [...]

Now that we’ve collectively agreed Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull never happened, let us return to fawning over Steven Spielberg for that kind of “gee whiz, let’s do that again!” giddiness you get from watching movies like The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn. The director might be working from a collection of mid-20^th century comics by Belgian artist Hergé, but this is undeniably [...]

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 [...]