In a plot line suspiciously reminiscent of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, director Robert Luketic’s tepid corporate espionage thriller Paranoia sees another smart, ambitious young guy, who is desperate to escape his working class background, wind up seduced and manipulated by a corporate Satan. Liam Hemsworth plays Adam Cassidy, a lowly software engineer who mistakenly thinks he has the technological ideas
Read moreIs Jobs, the biopic of Apple founder the late Steve Jobs, a gratuitous corporate sell or an insightful critique of a complex and highly influential person? Actually, it’s a bit of both. Like David Fincher’s The Social Network, the film traces the ambitions, personal traumas and career trajectory of a brilliant but difficult computing pioneer. Jobs, however, is nowhere near
Read moreEarlier in the year we were treated to Olympus Has Fallen, an outrageously silly exercise in warped patriotism and gun worship in which Gerard Butler‘s former secret service agent single-handedly repelled a terrorist attack and saved the US President following a White House invasion. It was Die Hard in the White House and a film in which any connection to
Read moreDAKOTA FANNING – Cherrybomb. From THE RUNAWAYS. SIMON HOLMES & MORGANA ANCONE – Let’s do it (Aus). From LOVE AND OTHER CATASTROPHES. PYTHON LEE JACKSON – In a broken dream. From BREAKING THE WAVES. RICHARD STRAUSS – Also Sprach Zarathustra. From 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. SURFER BLOOD -Demon dance. From PARANOIA. WALKABOUT – Theme. NEIL YOUNG – Philadelphia. SHERYL CROW
Read moreCinema Paradiso director Giuseppe Tornatore evokes Hitchcock with his latest film The Best Offer, a strange, fascinating and intricately crafted story of romantic obsession, high art and anxiety disorders. Geoffrey Rush stars as Virgil Oldman a wealthy and powerful British art dealer and auctioneer operating in Rome. Elite in his field and an elitist in general, Virgil’s pompous, irascible and
Read moreStoker is a bizarre, hypnotic American gothic thriller which, as might be expected given its title’s reference to Dracula author Bram Stoker, revels in an atmosphere of menace. The prolific Mia Wasikowska stars as the sullen and taciturn teenager India Stoker who lives a Carrie-like existence with her comically flaky mother Evelyn (Nicole Kidman) in a large dilapidated southern mansion.
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