If something ever goes wrong, just do what Hollywood does and blame it all on the Nazis. Seriously, if Paul McGuigan’s sci-fi thriller Push is anything to go by, they’re responsible for everything. In a ridiculously overloaded voice-over, Dakota Fanning’s character explains how Nazi experiments resulted in a breed of artificially enhanced humans with paranormal abilities. No, this not an episode of Heroes, but it might as well be; there are those who can use telekinesis, ‘Movers’, those who can draw the future, ‘Watchers’, and those who can control minds, ‘Pushers’. But that’s only the beginning; there are also ‘Sniffs’, ‘Stitchers’, ‘Wipers’, ‘Shadows’ and whole range of talents. You’re going to want to bring along a pen and some paper to this one, folks.

Ah, the age-old mystery… trying to work out the meaning of life brings purpose to some and scepticism to others – Bart Simpson has a book on it, and the Monty Python team satirised it. But let’s get serious and face the fact that life isn’t all peachy, and accept that we always try to rid ourselves of the pain for want of happiness. The fickle thing about the meaning of life is that there’s never one straight answer, and everyone’s interpretations best suit their personal situation. Stories that tackle this agenda face the risk of opening themselves up to criticism if they don’t entirely believe in what they’re saying… $9.99 does, but it struggles to reveal exactly what it wants to convey.

I could easily join the legions of critics who have made a snider remark about how aptly titled The Ugly Truth is, but that’d be almost as unoriginal as the film itself. Whilst I admit there isn’t much room for originality in romantic comedies given how the outcome must always remain the same, grocery shopping is arguably a more novel experience than sitting through Robert Luketic’s (Legally Blonde, 21) latest effort. It’s essentially a rehash of Pretty Woman with the tongue-in-cheek attitude of Sex and the City, but has some serious consistency issues when it comes to matching the chemistry of the former and comedy of the latter.

Three minutes and ten seconds. That’s approximately how long it took director Michael Bay, the king of explosions, to blow something up in Transformers Revenge of the Fallen. Don’t go expecting the debris to settle for a second thereafter; once Bay’s canons have warmed up, he doesn’t stop firing.  Sure, this might make for some of the most explosive action ever to be captured on celluloid, or more accurately modelled on computer, but it doesn’t cease for 150 exhaustive minutes. That’s two and a half hours of epic robot battles, thunderous explosions and Megan Fox running in slow motion. Two of the three grow incredibly tiresome.
The fact that it took Michael Bay twice as long to explode something in his first live action rendition of the Hasbro toy franchise says something; almost everything about Transformers 2 has been double-sized. There are twice as many robots whom are twice as big, and twice the number of action sequences featuring twice as much CGI. Whilst it mightn’t be twice as long, it certainly feels that way.

 ”I prefer a story that has the good sense to stay on the page, where it belongs,” Helen Mirren’s character Elinor proclaims in the fantasy film Inkheart, and I couldn’t agree more. Whatever magic that existed on the pages of Cornelia Funke’s novel, to which the film was adapted from, was clearly lost in translation.

Screening for the BAFF as one of the Natuzzi Competition nominees, the only Italian representative comes from the adaptation of one of Italy’s most groundbreaking books of recent times. The mafia have always been around, repeatedly glorified in Hollywood and beyond (notably Underbelly on Australian TV screens) but this has sparked national debate and anxiety. Seeing the workings of these organisations on screen brings it that much closer to reality for audiences, but Gomorrah doesn’t convey the brutality that it hypes itself up for.

It’s no coincidence that Passengers – which received a limited release in the US last year – makes its way into Australian cinemas just when the buzz surrounding Anne Hathaway’s Oscar nomination is in full stride. However, it was in limited release for a reason; director Rodrigo Garcia (Nine Lives) is unable to build any suspense from the far-fetched and poorly paced script that takes one too many lessons in twist endings from M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense, The Happening). That is, Shyamalan long after he still had an air of credibility…

Someone please tell Mr. Smith to cheer up. His recent fondness for depicting depressed characters is becoming a bit, well, depressing.  A broke and homeless single father in The Pursuit of Happyness, the last living human in I am Legend, a lonely alcoholic superhero in Hancock and now a guilt ridden miseryguts in Seven Pounds. Is life really that gloomy for one of Hollywood’s highest paid actors?