Crackers

News, Reviews & Features
  • 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?

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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...

  • 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 ...

  • 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...

  • Grindhouse

    Movie Review | Ali | 9th March 2008

    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 ...

  • No Country For Old Men

    Movie Review | Ali | 4th January 2008

    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 ba...

  • Hot Fuzz

    Movie Review | Luke | 19th February 2007

    Imagine if you commanded the power to make any film your imagination could conjure up. At the press of a button, teams of minions would go trawling high and low for racks of guns, gallons of blood, and enough nubile young starlets to fill every position. Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright possess this power and deservedly so, as evid...