Crackers

Review: Avatar

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?

Review: Where The Wild Things Are

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.

Review: Paranormal Activity

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.

Review: District 9

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.

Review: (500) Days Of Summer

Ever been in love? Ever had your heart broken? Ever spent over 48 hours in nothing but your dressing gown, surrounded by empty bowls of cereal and tissues and bottles of whisky? Then you'll relate to (500) Days Of Summer.

Review: Moon

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...

Review: Frost/Nixon

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 ...

Review: WALL-E

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...

Review: Grindhouse

If you're looking for proof that America is a nation dangerously low on brain cells, then don't look to their president, their love of NASCAR or the success of Two And A Half Men - look at the cinema-going public and their increasingly erratic choices. In April last year, cinema patrons spectacularly failed to recognise a great ...

Review: No Country For Old Men

Midnight. Llewelyn Moss stirs in his bed, gets up and puts his boots on. "I'm fixin' to do something dumber'n hell," he tells his wife Carla (Kelly McDonald) as he heads out of his trailer. A few minutes later, he's fleeing for his life across the pitch black desert plain, pursued by a truck full of shotgun-wielding bad guys and...