CinemaUS 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 [...]

The very concept of a small budget comedy by Michael Bay sounds like a big studio action adventure by Ken Loach. But within minutes you know you’re firmly in the grip of Bay’s unique vision no matter how many millions he’s saving on special effects. The bikinis are tiny, the muscles are huge and the [...]

When I was in middle/high school (mid 1970s – yes, I’m old) there were several books we were required to read, among them “The Old Man and The Sea,” “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “The Great Gatsby.” Though they had all been made into films, because there was no home video I actually had to [...]

Even by the mid 19990s, years before the current Twilight-inspired vampire craze, we could have asked ourselves whether cinema’s most over-represented monster had run its course. We’d already had dozens of films about them, from the purist approach (”Bram Stoker’s Dracula”, 1992) to Gen X partygoers (”The Lost Boys”, 1987), and sci-fi (”Lifeforce”, 1985) 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 knows how to pick the prettiest postcard on the rack, just isn’t sure what to write on it. Terrence Malick’s companion piece to “Tree of Life”, structured and in the much the same way as this, is a visually strong and breathtaking beautiful movie – like the 2011 film – that will have film [...]

You really can’t go wrong when your cast boasts (4) actors with a combined (20) Academy Award nominations (and (5) Oscars) between them. And after a few minutes “The Big Wedding” doesn’t disappoint. It’s a big weekend for all involved. Alejandro (Ben Barnes) and Missy (Amanda Seyfried) are going to be married. Alejandro was a [...]

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 [...]

Witness the last of Michael Shannon’s obscurity to movie audiences (you already know him well if you’re a ”Boardwalk Empire” fan). Until now he’s just been that extremely tall guy with the crazy eyes, wide mouth, brooding menace and threat of violence with one gaze of his steely eyes. The reason he won’t be obscure [...]

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 [...]

If you ask most people who Jackie Robinson was they can tell you he was a baseball player. Some may even know that he was the first African-American to play in the major leagues. But few really know the struggles he went through, both personally and professionally, to achieve his goals. On April 15, 1947, [...]

”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 [...]

Scandanavian horror cinema has a mood and a flavour all its own. Even when dealing with the essentially silly, the ace ”Trollhunter” believed in its subject. The sequence of the billy goats gruff trip-trapping across the bridge (referencing the fairy story) made sense as part of the story when it could have been monumentally stupid. [...]

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 [...]