A fantastic sci-fi horror film brimming with suspense and packed with elaborate special effects, The Thing is an example of genre filmmaking at its finest, while also standing out as one of the few examples of a remake that actually improves upon the earlier film. Unfortunately, I am referring to John Carpenter’s 1982 film – itself a remake of 1951’s The Thing from Another World – and not the 2011 [...]

Hideously photographed and generically told, but the inherently compelling real-world subject matter of Larysa Kondracki’s The Whistleblower ensures that the film remains somewhat engaging, though largely by default. A grim and grizzly tale of political corruption and human exploitation based on actual events, the film stars Rachel Weisz as a Nebraska cop assigned to the United Nations as part of a peace-keeping force in post-civil war Bosnia who uncovers a [...]

What does one say about the Red Hot Chili Peppers? Are they still a force to be reckoned with? Have they verged into the realms of caricature yet? Is it a sign of the times that this once die-hard fan has little or nothing new to say about the band that inspired those excited squeals of youth? Gone are the days when Chili Peppers posters adorned the bedroom walls of [...]

In the closing credit scroll of writer/director Kevin Smith’s Red State, the cast is listed under three subheadings: sex, religion and politics. It’s not a very subtle way of outlining the themes of the film, but then again, very little is subtle about this ambitious and visceral stylistic departure from a writer/director who, up until now, has confined himself to the realm of raunchy adult comedies in the vein of [...]

Quirky is the new cool. Introverted is the new extroverted. Freeze frames are the new flashbacks. And if that montage doesn’t come with a wry voiceover or a dry folk-rock track, you might as well forget about it.

These are a few of the unwritten laws of the coming-of-age indie: films that are so concerned with being different, they’re at risk of becoming the same. Sometimes, the quirkiness comes across naturally [...]

Eurgh. That is my overwhelming reaction to Lisa Dunham’s Tiny Furniture, a directorial debut that I can acknowledge does a lot of things right, but I still found absolutely unbearable to watch. A story about a directionless college graduate who moves back in with her mother and sister, it’s a tale based, one suspects, on Dunham own life experience, even to the point that she casts herself and her family [...]

The road to happiness is not an easy one. In the new comedy Horrible Bosses from director Seth Gordon (Four Holidays), three friends find that their respectively unbearable bosses are huge obstacles on that road. They have a simple solution. Murder their bosses. What could go wrong?

The answer, of course, is everything.

The film follows three initially separate story lines. Jason Bateman (Paul) is Nick Hendricks, a corporate salary man who [...]

In 2008, a certain Irish film proved that the f-word can, in fact, be used almost exclusively as an adjective with achingly funny results. It also proved, much to the dismay of Ralph Fiennes, that swans are not everybody’s f***ing thing. If you hadn’t guessed, that film was Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges, and it was nothing short of a masterpiece of pitch-black comedy.

I remind you of [...]