CinemaAU Reviews

You only need to have seen one “Hangover” film to know the formula of this series: Bachelor party. Memory loss. Retrace steps of crazy drunken night. Solve a mystery like some sort of frat version of the Scooby gang. But in this third (and potentially final) film by director Todd Phillips, the story manages to [...]

Halle Berry offers up the muscle in WWE Films’ latest release, a non Wrestler-headlined thriller that rejigs the old “Play Misty for Me”/”Talk Radio” template and interlaces it with the kind of heavy-volumed teen-friendly thrill sequences most of the successful popcorn thrillers embody. Halle Berry, in one of her better parts in a while (her [...]

He’s back in black. Or rather, Black. Like not crediting an orange peel for holding together the delicious citrus within, it’d be a crime not to acknowledge the work famed fanboy screenwriter cum director Shane Black has done with this third instalment in the ”Iron Man”series. Inheriting the job from Jon Favreau (who retains an [...]

Sometimes it’s easy to spot the discipline a moviemaker has come from. Some are simple storytellers with writing backgrounds and little real interest in mood-setting except what the words on the page bring – think of the films of Kevin Smith or David Mamet, where the script is fairly sacred. And some artists are from [...]

”Oblivion” is what happens when Richard Mathieson walks into a bar, picks up Philip K.Dick, and later uses the stickers from his synthesizer’s keyboard as lubricant. Like a fairly standard Vegas buffet located on the glitziest part of the strip, ”TRON Legacy” director Joseph Kosinski’s sophomore effort is, not unexpectedly (considering his dazzling debut), an [...]

When I first learned that I would be going to see “Jurassic Park” in its 3D remastered glory, I had a flashback to my 11 year old self sitting in a cinema in 1993, watching the Steven Spielberg masterpiece with my cousins. I remember it scared me. It scared me a lot. Now its 2013, [...]

“What have you done to him? What have you done to his eyes, you maniacs!” Rosemary Woodhouse – “Rosemary’s Baby” In the future, after wars have decimated the planets, ours is visited by an alien race that begins to take over our bodies, making everyone happy and polite. However, not everyone has been turned. As [...]

A vanilla ice-cream is still a vanilla ice-cream even after its been dipped in chocolate and doused in sprinkles. 2009′s ”G.I Joe : The Rise of Cobra”, inspired by those little leaf-coloured plastic figurines most of us played with out in the school sandpit, was as Vanilla as a soggy marshmallow . Still, the ensemble [...]

Young Albert (Mason Cook) is a lonely boy. He lives with his mother who works frequently, meaning he’s often home alone. One year, while celebrating his birthday (alone) he opens a present to reveal a magic kit complete with an instructional video featuring the great Rance Holloway (Alan Arkin). Albert practices the enclosed tricks and [...]

You’ve moved to Tasmania. Your husband is off saving whales. Your twin two year olds are terrors that won’t take their wings off. Literally. And you have no family or friends around. What do you do? Let out your frustrations at the kitchen sink. And by let our frustrations, I mean…sing. Sing. SING. Based on [...]

Ignoring the odd, erm, pot hole, the Yellow Brick Road has never looked so gloriously eyegasmic as it has in cinema’s latest return to Oz. Sam Raimi’s “Oz : The Great & Powerful” adds unyielding sunlit tar to the ‘Wizard of Oz’ legacy with a beautifully-looking, majestically entrancing and effortlessly-transporting escape that maximizes the full [...]

The first thing I did when I walked out of “21 and Over” was go double check the movie poster in the lobby. No, I hadn’t misread it. In big letters it proclaimed that “21 and Over” was “FROM THE WRITERS OF ‘THE HANGOVER’” I thought for a few minutes…maybe it’s the writers of the [...]

I’m perhaps amongst the rare few who was actually looking forward to seeing ‘A Good Day To Die Hard’. Also known as ‘Die Hard 5’, the fifth instalment of the once acclaimed ‘Die Hard’ franchise had many a journalist and fan-boy alike both cringe with concern (due to the wayward fourth venture ‘Live Free or [...]

With the hit-and-miss traditions of Australian comedies, ”Save Your Legs!” could’ve been an absolute balls-up that left the industry as red as a Kookaburra Red King 2pce. Instead, it’s one that snags a few points on the usually bare scoreboard of the sub-genre, and might possibly do runs around the competition upon release. Tyro director [...]

Bull Durham may disagree, but baseball, with its three strikes and you’re out rule, doesn’t add much of a frame to a perseverance meme. Australian Rules Football (AFL), on the other hand, is a much better crest for pushing on in this game we call life; we may fall, we may get tossed about a [...]