Seemingly cobbled together like Frankenstein’s monster from bits of Harry Potter, Twilight and Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the latest supernatural teen-adventure romance, Mortal Instruments: City of Bones. Based on the first book in the series of popular novels by Cassandra Clare, this adaptation is, despite expensive and elaborate production design and a multitude of action sequences, strangely dull and
Read moreImagine Bridget Jones’s Diary and Zooey Deschanel’s TV show New Girl filtered through the mind of Woody Allen and you would have ultra-quirky, 20-something comedy Frances Ha. Greta Gerwig plays the ditzy, flaky title character, a 27-year-old woman who floats through her quasi-hipster life in New York City hoping to make it as a professional dancer. With almost no money
Read moreWe’re the Millers is one of this year’s guilty pleasures. Even though it’s low-brow, formulaic and implausible, it’s still an enjoyable comedy. The film bubbles away in an amiable, mildly risqué fashion that recalls the National Lampoon Vacation movies. Its trump card is a fine cast of comedy actors led by Jason Sudeikis and Jennifer Aniston whose well-honed comic timing
Read moreSouth African director Neill Blomkamp burst onto cinema screens in 2009 with his superb debut film District 9. That film intelligently mixed sci-fi spectacle with biting humour, Kafkaesque themes of identity loss and potent social commentary about poverty, the plight of refugees and socio-economic and racial divisions in South Africa. District 9 was always going to be a tough act
Read moreStar-packed crime caper film Now You See Me plunges us into the world of glitzy, big-budget magic shows normally occupied by the likes of David Copperfield and Siegfried and Roy. In a fun but extremely far-fetched storyline, four famed magicians J. Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), Henley Leeves (Isla Fisher), Merrit McKinney (Woody Harrelson) and Jack Wilder (Dave Franco) are recruited
Read moreSophia Coppola’s latest film The Bling Ring is based on a 2010 Vanity Fair article about the antics of a group of LA high school kids who broke into the homes of dubious celebrities like Paris Hilton, Audrina Patridge and Lindsay Lohan to steal clothes and jewellery. In Sophia Coppola’s film the group are led by bratty alpha-female Nikki (Emma
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