movie
Frozen is a surprisingly effective thriller from director Adam Green, previously responsible for more goofy horror outings such as Hatchet . The premise here is that three students on a ski-ing holiday try to fit in one last ride at the end of the day, and end up marooned on a ski-lift with no-one around.
Chopping Mall appeared during the home video boom of the mid-80s, and I have fond memories of this movie and lots of its contemporaries. All those articles in Fangoria and Starburst were suddenly given life by the availability of the movies in your own home, and drinking several pints of beer before watching didn't do the movies any harm either. Well at the risk of sounding like a country song, some things are better as a memory...
There are very few movies with a reputation as bad as that of The Hunting Party. It's mean-spirited, gory and not afraid to offend its audience, and those are just the positive things...
Vanishing on 7th Street is the latest movie from Brad Anderson, who has had a mixed career since his breakthrough with Session 9. It's a Twilight Zone-style story, also owing a bit to the old Stephen King novella The Langoliers (filmed indifferently for TV by Tom Holland in 1995). A few random characters are isolated by darkness encroaching on their everyday environments in Detroit.
Newcomer Hailee Steinfeld takes the central role of Mattie in the Coens' new adaptation of the classic Charles Portis novel True Grit, as a young girl searching for her father's killers. Jeff Bridges gets the eye-catching role (ouch) of Reuben 'Rooster' Cogburn, aged gun-hand, and Matt Damon plays the dandy Texas Ranger LaBeouf, dragged along with Rooster in Maddie's quest.
Downbeat and atmospheric adaptation of Daniel Woodrell's bestseller, starring Jennifer Lawrence as a girl searching for her father in the bleak setting of the Ozark mountains.
I first saw the Skyline trailer last year, and it looked impressive in a post-pub sort of way, so I was looking forward to its release despite it being from the Strause brothers, makers of the much-maligned AVP: Aliens vs. Predator - Requiem. However I'm now coming late to this on DVD, and in the meantime it's picked up negative word of mouth to almost rival its antecedent.
If ever a title was guaranteed to get me in a cinema, it’s Cowboys and Aliens (although the strategy didn’t work for Zombie Strippers). When I was a kid, my dad was a big cowboy fan, and I couldn’t understand why he’d watch a formulaic dusty shoot-out in a one-horse town when all the universe beckoned, along with an infinite variety of scaly enemies. Forty years later, and it’s true that you turn into your parents… So I went into Cowboys and Aliens hoping for a 80/20 mix in that order, and this is just one of the things...
Largely forgotten Europudding of a western, uniting Connery and Bardot, two of the biggest stars of the time. It's based on a story by Western veteran Louis L'Amour, although it also bears a strong resemblance to Elmore Leonard's story Hombre, filmed a couple of years earlier with Paul Newman in the title role. It's your basic fishes out of water story...
Excellent Swedish adaptation of the first in Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy. Michael Nyqvist stars as crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist, recruited to investigate the death of a young girl 30 years previously in a remote part of Sweden. Noomi Rapace plays emo bisexual computer hacker Lisbeth Salander who ends up on Blomkvist's side in the battle against assorted evil authority figures.
