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Avatar

Movie Review | Ali | 16th December 2009

How to rate a film like Avatar? Do just that: review the film, not the hype. Believe what you've heard industry execs raving about and James Cameron's latest opus is a "game-changer", supposedly the biggest cinematic revolution since the advent of colour film and talking pictures. These are superlatives impossible to qualify; exactly how do you know you've changed the game if play has yet to resume? No, the only way to analyse Avatar is to strip it down of all its baggage until you're left with the core experience: cold, hard data. And what do you get?

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Where The Wild Things Are

Movie Review | Chris | 10th December 2009

With Where the Wild Things Are, Spike Jonze not only solidifies his reputation as a great director (as if there were any doubt), but he also demonstrates an uncanny understanding of precisely what it's like to be a kid. With this gorgeous and touching adaptation of the beloved children's book by author Maurice Sendak, Jonze and screenwriter David Eggers have managed to capture the essence of childhood; all the confusion, fear, pain, anger, loneliness, and above all the joy of being a kid are evident throughout.

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Paranormal Activity

Movie Review | Phyllis | 23rd November 2009

What happens when you sleep? So asked Israeli-born filmmaker Oren Peli, who, after moving into a suburban San Diego tract house, discovered that odd, unsettling things began to occur in the house. Books inexplicably fell off of shelves. Strange noises were heard in the night... but whereas lesser mortals may have called in a priest or even a Ghostbuster, Peli thought that living in a spook house might make for a nice little horror flick.

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District 9

Movie Review | Ali | 3rd September 2009

Alien skirmishes. Big guns. Badass military hardware. Interstellar war. Yeah, the Halo movie would have been pretty cool. Alas, with credit being crunched at every corner, a $200m budget was deemed too expensive for a mere videogame movie (but a toy movie? Well, that's another story) and the project was canned. Bummer.

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Moon

Movie Review | Ali | 15th July 2009

Considering that Neil Armstrong's giant leap for mankind ranks as one of the most recent triumphs in the grand scheme of human exploration, it's a little odd that science-fiction has never really landed on the Moon. A case of 'been there, done that', perhaps? Maybe Apollo 11 robbed the Moon of its mystery. But given that every h...

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Frost/Nixon

Movie Review | Rob | 26th January 2009

David Frost. Many of us probably know him as that bloke who used to poke his nose through keyholes, but back in the '70s, Frost was kind of a big deal - a media playboy who was making a name for himself on the box both in London and Australia. However, after his New York chat show was cancelled, Frost was desperate to save ...

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The Wrestler

Movie Review | Ali | 21st January 2009

It's easy to laugh at Mickey Rourke. He's a has-been; a dog fancier; an actor reduced to the stakes of a bum. After a well-publicised career meltdown, an ill-advised return to boxing left him with, in the words of Charlie Brooker, "a face like wet cat food." He is, in short, a joke. Yes, it's easy to laugh at Mickey Rourke. But ...

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Slumdog Millionaire

Movie Review | Ali | 7th January 2009

Despite Chris Tarrant's stupid face, there's no denying that Who Wants To Be A Millionaire is an ingenious concept for a game show. Resist flipping channels for just a few minutes and before you know it, you're yelling furiously at your TV because a man from Surrey doesn't know the capital of Venezuela or punching the air with j...

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Hellboy II: The Golden Army

Movie Review | Mark | 27th August 2008

In the cinematic dark ages i.e. before The Dark Knight and Iron Man, Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy was one of the decade's best comic-book adaptations. The premise was darkly comic, the material sharply human, and the characters behaved as people who happen to be possessed with great powers, not faceless ciphers designed to cynic...

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WALL-E

Movie Review | Ali | 4th July 2008

They're considered the titans of animation, are revered by their competitors and are beloved around the world. They've won countless Oscars by bewitching audiences with cutting-edge tech married to classic-era storytelling. They're generally considered as unparalleled purveyors of the very highest quality of cinema. So what exac...

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