The adaptation of video games to the cinema screen has generally been an unhappy one. Without the thrill of interaction and with a game’s wafer thin plot barely providing a decent film narrative, video games adaptations – from the execrable Super Mario Brothers to last year’s lumbering Warcraft – have usually been silly and dull. Assassin’s Creed promised a little
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 moreThere have been countless big screen adaptations of Shakespeare’s works and they’ve varied in quality from stunning (Roman Polanski’s Macbeth and Franco Zeffirelli’s The Taming of the Shrew) to hideous (the recent Kiwi caravan park version of Romeo and Juliet). Australian director Justin Kurzel’s adaptation of Macbeth falls somewhere in the middle, it’s an ambitious attempt to capture the raw
Read moreRust and Bone is an unusual French romantic drama about broken people seeking repair and redemption. Unbelievably, the film manages to credibly mix dysfunctional relationships, killer whales, bare-knuckle fighting and amputee sex. Matthias Schoenaerts plays Ali a deadbeat dad and petty thief who just can’t stay out of trouble. Drifting through life he stumbles from one job to another as
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