Mark Duplass

News, Reviews & Features
  • Review: Paddleton is an awkward embrace with fragile masculinity

    Movie Review | Luke Whiston | 6th March 2019

    SPOILER ALERT: You will die. It's just a matter of finding out when and how - and that's only if you see it coming. Many people will wake up this morning not knowing it's going to be their last day on earth. The lucky ones will have some advance notice of their expiration date, and so get a chance to take stock of their lives before deciding what to do with their remaining time. Traditional Hollywood plotting dictates this to be some kind of quest to undo past misdeeds as part of a redemption arc, before slipping away quietly surrounded by loved ones and that hot girl from college. But not in Alex Lehmann and Mark Duplass' Paddleton, in which a pair of friends go on a road trip to commit clinician-assisted suicide after one of them discovers he has terminal cancer. With a wacky setup like that they should have called this movie DEATH RIDE!

  • Tully

    Movie Review | Ed Williamson | 11th May 2018

    There are no ugly people in Hollywood, and as such the idea of ugging-up a bit for a role has become a "brave" one. It puts you in the awards conversation, as though peeling off some make-up or yellowing your teeth a bit reveals depth. This involves an acknowledgement that the profound is an exception, and I suppose that the industry is therefore preoccupied by surface sheen. For actresses this proposition also suggests that to be beautiful is to be shallow, which is a bit rich, since if they aren't beautiful they aren't allowed in the door. I think Charlize Theron largely transcends this, but she remains most critically celebrated when she's made to look her least pretty.

  • Safety Not Guaranteed

    Movie Review | Ed Williamson | 26th December 2012

    If time travel is ever invented, the pioneers will travel back to 2012, watch a film or two and think what a bunch of mugs we all were. The mechanics are pretty realistic, they'll say, but Joseph Gordon-Levitt looks nothing like Bruce Willis. They might be charmed, though, by the quaint idea of there being such a thing as an independent film industry, and by Safety Not Guaranteed, which would charm anyone. Even a cyborg replicant hybrid, which is obviously what future-people will be.

  • We've finally made it

    Movie News | Ali | 23rd November 2012

    Look at me now, Dad.