Exactly what writer/ director Damien Chazelle was trying to say with his latest film, Babylon, a wild sprawling, occasionally funny, often ridiculous, exhaustingly manic, yet emotionally hollow homage/satire/savaging of early Hollywood is not entirely clear. It’s as if he’s poured all his memories of film making and watching into a blender, mixed them with lurid fantasies of Hollywood’s debauched underbelly
Read moreBullet Train is one of the most irritating films so far this year: a manic, juvenile, cartoonish pastiche of Guy Ritchie and Quentin Tarantino that substitutes caricature for character and a loose collection of violent, yet dull sight gags for plot. Based on the Japanese novel Maria Beetle by Kotaro Isaka, the film sees a gaggle of professional killers: American
Read moreAcross eight films (if we call Kill Bill one film) Quentin Tarantino has cultivated a reputation as a modern movie savant and a ravenous cinephile who has been handed the greatest toy imaginable, a Hollywood movie budget. With this he’s conjured lurid comic book crime dramas and off-kilter genres movies all filtered through his universe of pop cultural obsessions. After
Read moreAllied is a slow-moving but effective World War 2 spy drama. The film stars Brad Pitt and Marion Cotilliard in a relationship that inevitably draws comparisons with Mr and Mrs Smith. Pitt plays Canadian Air Force group captain Max Vatan (Pitt) who teams up with French resistance operative Maryanne (Marion Cotillard) in Casablanca in 1942 to assassinate a Nazi ambassador.
Read moreThe Big Short sounds like the title of a caper comedy and in a sense it is although the caper is a particularly dubious one, the multi-billion dollar exploitation of a dysfunctional and seemingly corrupt financial system by greedy unscrupulous bond traders that led to the GFC and the financial devastation of millions of working people in 2008. Directed by
Read moreShaun of the Dead and Warm Bodies showed that there is something inherently comical about zombie movies. These films suggested that the sight of actors in bad makeup staggering around and chewing on people’s intestine had become ridiculous and lost its ability to shock. In that light, Brad Pitt’s latest film World War Z seemed to be courting ridicule with
Read more