CinemaAU Reviews

When the garbage man empties the trash, there’s usually always some ghastly goo hanging from the rim or sitting atop of a stuck newspaper at the bottom. That neglected eyesore is ”Resident Evil : Retribution”. Atop of the mouldy banana, doused in week-old quiche leftovers, is a time-wasting zombie series – based on the popular [...]

When you think of all the potential benefits of time travel – going back to avoid catastrophes, make smarter investments, inform your younger self that the dreamboat you’ve been crying over is totally not worth it – using it to dispose of bodies doesn’t automatically spring to mind, but that is indeed the concept behind [...]

The Michael Jordan of cinema, Adam Sandler is out to conquer yet another genre – and ideally the comic superstar, whose been smashing his trademark lowbrow comedies out of the park for years now (the one where he played his own female twin, the one where he romanced box-office poison Jennifer Aniston, the one where [...]

A high speed pursuit leads to a deadly shootout with a quartet of gang bangers, captured clearly on the police car’s video camera. Just another day in Los Angeles. Several weeks later we join police officers Brian Taylor (Gyllenhaal) and Mike Zavala (Pena) as they return to duty. Currently enrolled in college and taking filmmaking [...]

If Aussie director John Hillcoat had suddenly found himself charged with the task of doing a ‘Dukes of Hazzard’ reboot, one imagines it wouldn’t be at all that dissimilar to ”Lawless”, a southern fried actioner with as much machismo as it does moonshine. Hillcoat, known for directing dark, bleak period pieces (and ones that generally [...]

Food for thought? Indeed. Whereas most films set in the middle east these days sport flashy clips of Black Hawk helicopters, soldiers being sprayed between the twirling sand storms, or depictions of madman dictators, director Trevor Graham’s “Make Hummus not War” fixes on a far less violent – but no more combative – angle of [...]

Written and directed by Nicholas Jarecki, ”Arbitrage” is a morality play veiled as a murder mystery. Richard Gere is the bad guy, a troubled hedge-fund manager named Robert Miller. With his million-dollar smile and designer suits, he’s gotten away with a lot – and may continue to doing so. He’s cheating on his wife (Susan [...]

Like a Karate Kid movie without The Crane, Walter Salles’ ”On the Road” would lose its footing – or should that be thumbs? – without it’s astutely-cast leads. As those wild literary heroes of Jack Kerouac’s classic beatnik novel, Sam Riley, Garrett Hedlund and Kristen ‘Twilight’ Stewart burn rubber as Sal, Moriarty and Marylou, respectively, [...]

Australia ships back a couple of it’s thriving exports, and revives the directing career of a local steady, for this hokey but entertaining ‘Jaws-in-a-Supermarket ‘corker. Directed by musician cum filmmaker Kimble Rendall (”Cut”), and featuring the recognizable mugs of recent Hollywood hires Julian McMahon and Xavier Samuel, Bait is a genre effort that’s unquestionably ‘fin’ [...]

Buzzing with fast cash exchange and “conversations that never happened,” “The Ambassador” follows Danish journalist, Mads Brugger as he goes undercover as a Liberian diplomat to explore the seedy underbelly of the blood diamond trade. The documentary is frightening and fascinating package, where diplomacy is bought and sold, yet Brugger pulls out a convincing yet [...]

The critics (and audiences) fawened all over this movie, and while it is worthy of praise, it hasn’t really done anything above and beyond what it’s predecessors have done. It’s only really as good as ”Toy Story” and ”Monsters Inc”, whereas previous Pixar films have tended to outshine their predecessors in turn. Marlin (Brooks) is [...]

After one of the standout debuts of the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, writer/director/composer Benh Zeitlin’s ”Beasts of the Southern Wild” will draw a more circumspect and certainly more divided reaction from cinemagoers. It has the esoteric, ambiguous and undisciplined narrative that’s always a harder sell in multiplexes, but it already has a strong indie film [...]

An author (Dennis Quaid) approaches a podium before a packed house. He announces the title of the book he’s just written, “The Words,” and begins to read a passage. It relates the story of another author, Rory Jansen (Cooper). We meet Rory and his wife, Dora (Saldana) in the back of a limousine, celebrating the [...]

After a few years on the bench, small-screen success stories Jane Turner and Gina Riley pull their most popular creations off the bench and put them back in the game. And while it’s terrific to have Kath & Kim back on the field, particularly considering we haven’t seen them in a while, it goes without [...]

Charlie Bronson (Shepard) and his girlfriend, Annie, (Bell) lie in bed, making the kind of promises only people in love make. A loud car outside alerts them that they have company. The driver is Randy (Tom Arnold). A U.S. Marshal, Randy can best be described as “clutzy.” One more spilled coffee or accidental discharge of [...]