Angelina Jolie stars as Evelyn Salt, a top CIA agent accused of being a sleeper KGB agent, in this action flick by Australian director Philip Noyce. Now stuck in a Hollywood action rut, Noyce’s mostly admirable back catalogue includes Rabbit-Proof Fence, The Quiet American, Clear and Present Danger, and the 1997 film version of The Saint. Salt goes on the lam after she’s accused of having been trained to assassinate the Russian president and put into action a sequence of events that would see the US President (bizarrely cast here as yet another boring old white man) push the Big Red Button and start a thermonuclear war. The film also stars Live Schreiber—slumming it as Salt’s long-time colleague and head of the CIA’s “Russian House” counter-intelligence operation; himself a possible double agent—and Don Cheadle Chiwetel Ejiofor as Peabody (a pretty white name for a black dude, right?), an agent in pursuit of the runaway spy.

Continue Reading

The first feature from US-based Italian director Floria Sigismondi chronicles the rise and fall of the world’s supposedly first-ever all-girl punk rock band, opening with their formation in 1975 and leading to their breakup, amid bickering and out of control drug use, in 1979. As it’s based on the autobiography of lead singer Cherie Currie, her character (played by Dakota Fanning) is front and centre—but securing a space in the limelight is Joan Jett (Kristen Stewart, Twilight, Adventureland). Checking off the rock-‘n’-roll movie basics competently, there’s plenty of drugs, swearing, sex [lesbian sex—Ed.] and highly-sexualized adolescents, which helps the film triumph over a couple of awkward moments.

Continue Reading

Armando Iannucci’s brilliantly witty political satire is one of the most quotable comedies of all time—and all of those quotes will involve swear words wrapped around one another like linguistic pretzels. The film is set some time in 2003, in the immediate pre-Iraq-invasion era, when a gaffe from the British Secretary of State for International Development—saying that, in some sense, war is “inevitable”—ignites a spin campaign like none other, spear-headed by the curse-happy Communications Director Malcolm Tucker, played by Peter Capaldi. This involves a jaunt across the Atlantic to Capitol Hill and the UN headquarters in New York, where the minister’s newly-hired assistant, Toby, encounters his college friend Liza Weld (Anna Chlumsky, all grown up since My Girl), an assistant to the US Assistant Secretary of State. James Gandolfini, playing a senior Pentagon military goon, spars with Tucker at the UN, while back home in the Minister’s constituency of Northamptonshire, Steve Coogan’s mother’s back yard is in peril because of a collapsing wall.

Continue Reading

Based on Ronald Hugh Morieson’s novel of the same name, Jason Stutter’s cringe-worthy new film follows Cedric (Hayden Frost), a lanky Harry Potter lookalike, as he teams up with a tubby blowhard, Mervyn (Heath Franklin), and an anaemic oddball nick-named “Spook” (Jemaine Clement), to photograph and blackmail adulterous couples around town. Cedric is a bookish loner who’s bullied at school and ignored at home—and, making matters worse, his dad, played by Tim Finn, has been driven mute by his wife’s death and embarrasses his son by building an impossibly tall tower out of scrap wood and other bric-à-brac in their front yard.

Continue Reading

Michael Douglas channels his performances as Gordon “Greed is Good” Gekko in this tale of a 60-year-old corporate high-flyer whose life gets flip-turned upside down—and let me take a minute, just sit right there, I’ll tell you why you shouldn’t watch this sad excuse for entertainment. His character is a narcissistic misogynist, filled with bile and contemptuous of almost everyone, who almost lands in prison for fraud (maybe tax avoision?) having run a car dealership into the ground. Only his money saves him from wearing an orange jumpsuit behind bars for a few decades. He’s probably about to die any minute from a heart attack—his EKG indicates arrhythmia—and he hates basically every (wo)man in his life, with the exception of his new wife’s 18-year-old daughter, whom he takes to a prospective college campus upstate and is all too happy to promptly seduce. The remainder of the film deals with his attempts to claw his way out of the gutter and into his family’s cool but fiducially solvent embrace.

Continue Reading

The third feature from Argentinean director Alexis dos Santos is exactly as lazy as its title implies. Although it’s a step up from the tedious naïveté of his 2006 film Glue, the film still leaves the viewer wanting something—anything—more, especially in terms of character development. The film follows a frizzy-haired aimless dude in his early ’20s as he manoeuvres through London’s art-world underground, clubbing, drinking, doing drugs and crashing at various squatters’ flats at night—and trying to find his estranged father by day. He encounters a handful of Manix Pixie Dream Girls (Wikipedia it) and art-school dropouts/wannabe artistes. It’s kinda like Skins but with less melodrama and much less actual sex/masturbation. Like Glue, it basically goes nowhere—and not in the way Lost in Translation goes “nowhere,” but in the bad literally nothing is happening to this protagonist way. I don’t like it when people call films boring—it’s quite often a lazy way of saying they didn’t try hard enough to understand the filmmakers’ intentions; that they essentially just didn’t “get” what the film was trying to do—but this really is just a mind-numbing waste of time. Go watch an episode or three of Freaks & Geeks instead.

- Hugh Lilly