Avengers: Age of Ultron is the 11th Marvel comics cinema adaptation and the series is feeling a little tired. The first Iron Man and Avengers films cleverly balanced dynamic action with cheeky humour and an inventive vision of futuristic technology but the many Marvel superhero films that have followed, including Age of Ultron, have, unfortunately, become tiresome and infuriatingly cluttered
Read moreGreenberg and Frances Ha director Noah Baumbach’s latest film While We’re Young is an insightful, sporadically funny comedy/drama about artistic integrity, the disappointments of middle age and the cultural clash between Generations X and Y. Oddly this film has been sold as a light relationship comedy but it’s a more substantial film than that. Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts star
Read moreThis week on ‘Built For Speed’ we take a look at two of the more interesting films for 2015, the cerebral sci-fi drama Ex Machina and Trash a story of political corruption set amid the Brazilian slums. There’s also plenty of fine music with a selection of magnificent tracks from Swedish bands like the Hellacopters as well as some terrific new
Read moreDespite the fact that The Gunman is set amid the tragic turmoil of the war in the Congo and the fact that it stars and was co-written by noted Hollywood activist Sean Penn, this film is not an exceptionally political film. What appears in the first few minutes to be a Syriana-style exploration of third world political corruption and the
Read moreCombining supernatural scares with a touch of the dark, hypnotic mood of Jonathon Glazer’s Under The Skin, the sinister melancholia of Let The Right One In, the grim suburbia of John Carpenter’s Halloween and the sexualised teen world of Larry Clark’s films, the creepy, atmospheric It Follows manages to connect low budget art house cinema with classic teen horror. Impressively,
Read moreThe Fast and the Furious films have always been ludicrous but the latest instalment Furious 7 is as implausible and ridiculous as a Michael Bay film. Never have so many bad guys with machine guns shot so inaccurately, never have so many people survived savage beatings, back-breaking falls, missile attacks and car wrecks that would pulverise a normal human being.
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