What do you do when you fall off the horse? Why, you jump back on, of course! Or rather, on every attractive female twenty-five years younger. But aside from the sleaze, Solitary Man pushes (albeit, a few ) buttons, mainly as we question whether Ben Kalmen (Michael Douglas) is a troubled human being going through a tough time or a creep with no morals, no manners and the mind of a confused adolescent.
With this summer’s spectacularly bad Grown Ups and Dinner for Schmucks still fresh in our memories, we could be forgiven for writing off the US comedy machine for this summer. Happily, The Other Guys has gone some way to redressing the balance with a fresh and funny take on the ‘buddy cop’ motif that’s well worth a watch.
District 9 is a welcome return to politics in sci-fi films. It begins like an Apartheid spin on Brazilian ghetto drama City Of God, mutates into The Fly, and winds up pushing emotional buttons in a way reminiscent of ET…
Most people don’t like to be in a lift, full stop. But imagine being there with four others, three with a shady past and the king of shade, the devil himself. As a sinner yourself, your complaint may not make it to the file and pot, kettle, black would spring to mind. The moral of the story: the devil punishes wrongdoers. And not just with coal in your stocking.
At the invitation of the Swedenborg Society, Best For Film is publishing a special series of reviews to follow its ‘Images of the Afterlife in Cinema’ film season, which will be exploring life, death and everything in between. This week we’re struggling to get to the bottom of Marc Forster’s psychological drama Stay.
In True Legend, the supremely talented martial arts choreographer Yuen Woo-ping has returned to the style which made his name with the 1978 hit Drunken Master. The film follows the story of Beggar Su as the adversity of his life leads him to develop a unique form of Wushu, but that’s not really important – all you’ll be interested in is the spectacular fights.
For decades, Fritz Lang’s expressionist sci-fi Metropolis has been considered an indisputable classic. This fact has not changed. The film, however, has. With its running time having been cut by a quarter shortly after its German premiere in 1927, the full version of Lang’s epic was long presumed lost, until it miraculously turned up in Argentina two years ago. Having been recut and restored, the version we see now is the closest audiences have been to Lang’s vision in over 80 years – and it’s just as astonishing as you might expect.
It’s the fourth installment in the Resident Evil franchise and IT’S IN 3D! Alice is back to kick-ass and not even the removal of her powers is going to get her to calm down. Ain’t nothing going to hold this girl down. Evil corporation, mneh. Zombies, puh-lease. The traitorous living, move over, girlfriend! Unfortunatley, even in the spirit of “GIRL POWER”, there is not much to this film aside from guns, the undead and women fighting the undead. With guns. Which I guess is pretty standard for a computer game.
The Runaways were the goddesses of the Riot Grrrl movement, and charting their extraordinary journey from suburban insignificance to global stardom was always going to be a challenge. Happily, this sensitively crafted and superbly cast film more than does justice to their extraordinary legacy.
Snipe London
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