CinemaUS Reviews

Halloween typically pumps out guts and gore but director Michael Stephenson (“Best Worst Movie”) injects charm and sentiment into an otherwise fright-filled holiday with “The American Scream, ” a documentary that explores the phenomenon of “home haunting” in the small town of Fairhaven, Massachusetts. Every year, Victor Bariteau, Manny Souza and father/son team, Richard and [...]

April Fool! A couple of years ago the world thought Joaquin Phoenix had slowly gone crazy. He grew a wild beard and declared himself through with acting, aiming to start a career as a rapper. Thankfully the whole episode was a stunt…an experiment for a documentary film featuring Phoenix called “I’m Still Here.” Now, with [...]

Look at the poster art for ”Seven Psychopaths”. It not only looks familiar, it’s not the first time Colin Farrell’s been here. In 2003 he starred in a violent ensemble comedy called ”Intermission”. As well as sharing a lot of the design elements that helped market Trainspotting to such heights, the poster loudly proclaimed the [...]

The first sentence in most synopses of ”The Sessions” will be enough to put you off – ‘a polio-afflicted man…’ It’s the kind of movie you’ll feel like you should see but don’t really want to and will probably endure rather than enjoy. It indeed – as some members of the cast have joked – [...]

It’s hard to say whether ”Nobody Walks” tells a story or just starts one (or several). A young, New York based filmmaker named Justine (Olivia Thirlby) arrives in Los Angeles at the invitation of a friend of a friend, sound artist Peter (John Krasinski), who’s offered to score her art film as a favour. Peter [...]

Horror movies centred around audio visual technology certainly aren’t new. Just like movies from Herbie to Christine apply human intent (malicious or otherwise) to a device as familiar as the car, the advent of the home movie revolution (thanks to the VCR and camcorder) sparked off a whole new collective cultural whimsy about how such [...]

You know a movie is good when it is based on real-life events – and uncertain, you cling to the edge of your seat anyway. So it is with the film “Argo,” Ben Affleck’s third time out as director of a feature film. The film opens in 1979 with the storming of the U.S. Embassy [...]

Emily Bronte’s classic literary novel, “Wuthering Heights” undergoes another adaptation with British filmmaker Andrea Arnold, who strips down the beautifully tortured love story in an attempt for realism and reduces it to nothing more than scenery and the minutiae of the everyday. “Wuthering Heights” tells the story of Heathcliff, (Solomon Glave), an orphan boy who [...]

Sometimes an actor just doesn’t seem to belong. If you looked at the cast list for ”The Paperboy” and thought ‘Zac Efron? That kid out of ”High School Musical” who tried to play a grown-up in the sappy, gilded melodrama of ”The Lucky One”?’, Lee Daniels (”Precious”) new film might just turn you around. Of [...]

Despite all the noise in the marketing about this being the first feature length stop motion animated 3D film, the only new aspect is the 3D. It’s a close cousin to Tim Burton’s 2005 film ”Corpse Bride”, so as usual we’re left with the question of whether the 3D adds anything. There aren’t many pop-out-of-the-screen [...]

In what is sure to be remembered as “the year of Channing Tatum,” a smaller budgeted film he did last year (it played the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival) is finally seeing the light of day. That film is “10 Years” and it is, surprisingly, an intimate look at a group of young adults who [...]

What do you do after you’ve rescued your daughter from sex traffickers in Paris, killing pretty much everyone in your sight to do it? If you’re Brian Mills (Neeson), you give that same daughter driving lessons and worry about her new boyfriend. You also head to Istanbul for a few days work. But when the [...]

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 [...]

Originally released in 2009 in Czech, the English dubbed version of ”Toys in the Attic” was released earlier this year with the voice talents of Forrest Whittaker, Joan Cusack, and Carey Elwes. The story takes place (spoiler alert!) in an attic. All of the forgotten toys come alive and carry on very innocently inspired lives. [...]

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 [...]