Reviews

Teeth

Our reviewer has been excited by Teeth for quite a while now. It’s just such a great concept — reclaiming the vagina dentata! So much possibility! So much expectation. So much pressure to love the damn thing. Ethan Robinson is prepared to be dazzled...

Gone Baby Gone

Like Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone probes the unimaginable horror of losing a child by examining the tragedy from the perspectives of the family, the police, and the perpetrators, while obscuring the lines that separate each of these concerned parties. David Holmes finds much to admire in Ben Affleck's gripping directorial debut

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Near-miss after near-miss after downright stinker - Tim Burton enthusiasts have been frustrated for years at his unreliable output, often slipping into a parody of his former glory, finding it hard to tread the delicate line on which he once blazed his trail. For one of the visionaries of our time, his strike-rate is dangerously high. Ethan Robinson gives the wild-maned loon one last chance to save his reputation as the dark prince of Hollywood.

Funny Games

Funny Games is a tale of vacationing suburbanites whose summer home is invaded by a pair of sadistic psychotics in golf shirts and white gloves and perhaps best viewed as the sort of coolly cinematic chiller than Hitchcock would have loved – or even made. Patrick Mckay gets under the skin of Haneke's first American jaunt.

Michael Clayton

Michael Clayton has simply no right to be as good as it is. Working firmly within the “hot-shot- lawyer-battles- evil-establishment” genre, you’d think there’d be no new territory to explore that hasn’t already been beaten to a pulp by countless John Grisham adaptations.

The Scene of the Crime

A French thriller drenched in blood-soacked tension, The Scene of the Crime deals with a kind of harsh emotionality that borders at times on sentimentality, at times on sadism. Ethan Robinson explores its murky depths...

Tell No One (Ne le dis a personne)

One of the best thrillers in recent years, Canet provides the audience with a wild monster of a detective movie. It just goes to show that the French really can do it better than the rest of us. There's certainly something special about this pot boiler from Harlan Cohen.

I am Legend

One of the most enjoyable apocalypses of recent times, I Am Legend has an horrific edge to savour - a kind of desperate glamour. It's not the best of its genre, but certainly one of the most enetertaining. What it lacks in sophistication it makes up for in money shots and slick editing.

Cloverfield

Cloverfield doesn’t do anything so dramatic as redefine the monster movie, it's nowhere as inventive or enthralling as The Host. But despite the constant hyper-hype, sledgehammer marketing and over-exposure, this is a damn fine monster movie. Ethan Robinson, recovered from motion sickness, tucks into the biggest movie of the year...

Phase IV

Phase IV is the only feature film directed by Saul Bass, the ingenious credit sequence specialist and it really is a truly remarkable, almost alien piece of work. It tracks the evolution of ants in the Californian desert and their confident bid to replace humans as the dominant species on the planet.