![]() | This is one fucking hellish experience. You are very lucky to be born after the plague is over. ...read more |

![]() | This is one fucking hellish experience. You are very lucky to be born after the plague is over. ...read more |


![]() | In 2007 when Lauren Greenfield started making her documentary The Queen of Versailles, she intended it to be about the billionaire couple who were building their ludicrous dream home: the biggest ever private residence in the States. But tragedy struck the family (and success the resulting film) when the 2009 financial crisis forced these rich Americas to face the loss of their fortune and their palatial home and turned Greenfield’s documentary into a pretty poignant ‘riches-to-rags’ kinda tale. ...read more |


![]() | Furious 6 announces itself with a splurge of generic sluts, the throaty roar of sovereign engines. Media previews are, ordinarily, a rather sombre affair: the same five or six critics, with their handfuls of stale popcorn. Today, however, the magnetic draw of this film has gathered at least ten times that number, mostly Athlone’s finest casuals who have, somehow, managed to evade Nu Metro’s asshole security in pursuit of a free ride. ...read more |


![]() | Baz Luhrmann, it appears, is waging war against the nightmarish memory of his high-school syllabus. He’s transmuting the materials of these dead texts – Romeo and Juliet, The Great Gatsby and Hamlet (rumoured) – into flamboyant spectacles, the kind which might have kept his adolescent self amused/enthralled; rather than, like most of us, in a cryogenic sleep of suspended arousal, urging to get home and masturbate in glorious catharsis to Jenna J and her dirigible-tits which could eclipse the day’s ...read more |


![]() | Do you remember Wentworth Miller? If not, summon to mind the image of a rectangular concrete slab left outside under turbulent meteorological conditions for two years: the resultant erosion which has eaten deep into the flesh of the concrete might mark out things ocular, nasal and buccal (which is to say, a rough kind of mouth). ...read more |


![]() | I have taken a roughly year-long absence from local cinema, and in that time I have seen its phantasms in my peripheral vision – films beckoning for a full evisceration like Mad Buddies or Sleeper’s Wake (which André Brink, reaching for the direst of cliché, calls a “tour de force”). I have resisted the anti-seductive lure of this kind of criticism, because what can be said beyond the usual critical platitudes, easily-summoned, boringly-dispatched? ...read more |


![]() | “Ever since that big dude with the hammer fell out of the sky,” says Aldrich Killian, “subtlety had its day.” Tony Stark’s latest and forgettable arch-enemy has a point here. Iron Man 3 is not a film which shares the tenuous obligation to realism that The Dark Knight imagines it does. Instead, it is a superhero epic of vertiginous mania, machinic cinema which swoops between its aesthetic excesses; it runs on for an eternity, each successive scene ramping up its ...read more |


![]() | Tom Cruise is a reminder that there is no justice in the relation between talent and wage in this world. The highest paid actor in Hollywood, nature has mercilessly challenged him along the vertical axis (not to mention the intellectual and religious) and his presence in all cinema summons something like a catastrophic force: a crumbling effect upon everything he stars in. ...read more |


![]() | Conjure your most bust-mouthed Cockney accent and recite: “I use’ tuh fink Danny Boyle was mustard. Now, I’m star’inna fink ‘e ain’t got the min’rals, do he?” I admit Boyle hasn’t exactly endeared himself to me since Trainspotting, and especially not during his detour into that vulgar fairytale Slumdog Millionaire – although I do wish him congratulation for the brief resurgence of the insult “chai-wallah” on Anglo-tongues. ...read more |

