Ed

Review: World War Z

Bloody globalisation. It's not enough to have a film about a bunch of jocks and hot co-eds being chased by a few zombies any more. Now they've got to be taking over the whole world. Or so you'd think: new summer tentpole Pitt-flick World War Z might want to be the blockbuster its marketing suggests, but it has a schizophrenic tendency to flit between bombast and quiet contemplation. Which would be fine, except that all of its best ideas have already been done better elsewhere.

Review: Snitch

I've watched a few WWE 'shoot' documentaries recently. They feature men whom I spent hours of my childhood watching get greased up and pretend to ram their elbows into one another's kidneys, now older and with faces like meat, talking candidly about the roles they were playing. It's striking how different they all are from their in-ring characters: remarkably good actors, in a way. The move from ring to action movies is a natural one, and Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson has always been the one most qualified to make it. But on the evidence of Snitch, he's forgotten one key piece of The Rock's credo: know your damn role.

Review: Mud

For a pigeonholed Hollywood star, performing a dramatic volte-face and stubbornly refusing to take on the types of project for which you're famous can't be easy. Our relationship with stars is tied up too fully in the idea of recognisable archetypes to make it so. Planning on casting Ray Liotta as a romantic leading man any time soon? Nope, but we've got an opening for a crooked cop if he's interested. So what Matthew McConaughey has achieved in the last couple of years is truly remarkable: to graduate from lightweight romcom go-to-guy to one of the most magnetic screen actors around.

BREAKING: DiCaprio greatly displeased by macaroons

"He thought there'd be more pink ones," a source confirmed.

Review: The Look Of Love

Any mainstream film purporting to be about porn should have actual porn in it, for my money. And if there's one thing my 14-year-old self learned the hard way by staying up to watch inevitably tepid erotic thrillers on Channel 5, it's that they never really do. But I think the idealist in him would be disappointed to see me greet The Look Of Love with the shrug it induced. Here, let's ask him. So, 14-year-old me, what do you— Hey! Stop doing that! This is a public place!

Review: Maniac

At the screening of Maniac I attended, some journalist types were talking loudly beforehand about hanging prepositions. They were against them, and didn't care much for starting sentences with 'But', either. I resisted the temptation to interject with my view, which is that these tend to form ugly constructions but that arbitrary prohibitive attitudes towards grammar are the enemy of creativity. I don't want to antagonise anyone, after all. But anyway, Maniac is a film you should give a wide berth to.

Review: Red Dawn

As my grandfather used to say, if there's one place it's wholly appropriate to wade into the American gun debate, it's in a UK-based review of an action blockbuster. Much as I'm not keen on the things myself, it's often ignored in media reporting over here that the Second Amendment right to bear arms is supposedly the American's last defence against tyranny, either by his government or by foreign invaders, and this is why many of them consider it so important. Red Dawn, then, is pretty much a Republican's wet dream.

Review: Broken

It's always heartening to report that a non-costume, non-street-crime British drama has made it to cinemas at all, let alone that it's any good. Broken, the debut offering from director Rufus Norris, is a rare thing: a film made on these shores that takes the best of British whimsy and lets you see the darkness that can lurk just below its surface, without a bodice or a firearm in sight.

Review: Arbitrage

I know most words. But 'arbitrage'? Right, like that's a word. Unless we've started speaking French all of a sudden. It is a film, though - or more accurately, two films. One of them is about a cop investigating some stuff and is fairly good. The other is about a bunch of guys in offices talking about spreadsheets, and is just as interesting as seeing that in real life.

Review: Mama

Just as Rob is now The Shiznit's go-to guy for dance movies, it seems I've somehow become the de facto horror critic around here. An unwise editorial decision at best: I'd only seen about six horror films before, and two of them were Ghostbusters in different aspect ratios. Here's a thing I've learned, though: there is a Spanish man called Guillermo del Toro who sneaks into edit bays and shoves his name in at the start of other people's films. But he seems to know his Spanish onions: Mama, the latest film he has credits-bombed, is pretty much triumphant from start to finish.