Movie Reviews

Title=Wolf Creek Score=8 Summary=True horror, suspense and terror unflinchingly shown onscreen. Some rough dialogue early on can jar you out of the movie, but this has some truly terrifying moments. Natural performances, with a stunning turn from the actor playing the psychopath. The "true story" aspect really does hurt the movie and causes more problems at the end, if this had been left out the movie would have scored higher.

Title=Broken Flowers Score=6 Summary= An impressive display by Bill Murray playing an over the hill Don Juan searching for his son. An artistic driven film which starts out slow but soon picks up and is very enjoyable. Slightly lacking in performance chemistry and affective dialogue. Good performances by Sharon Stone, Jessica Lange and Bill Murray.

Title=Crash Score=9 Summary=An uncompromising story, hard hitting, uncomfortable, but very meaty and enjoyable. With strong performances from a huge cast, and excellent writing, this makes for a very good movie. Watch out for some leads playing unexpected roles both excellently and not so. Well worth a watch for some thinking material and real entertainment.

Title=The Transporter 2 Score=6 Summary=Snagging my demographic isn't really all that hard. Show some amazing stunts, lots of fights with decent martial arts, and finally add in a hot chick with guns in her hands and you can pretty much guarantee a huge male audience will show up to see your film.

Title=A Sound Of Thunder Score=2 Summary=A Sci-Fi film can be goofy and dumb and yet still be fun at the same time. But A Sound Of Thunder fails at every level that you can think of. Nothing works in this movie and I can easily predict that this movie will be making my "10 worst movies of 2005" at the end of the year.

Title=The Constant Gardener Score=5 Summary=A movie that I SHOULD have liked, with good people in front of and behind the camera that ground itself to a halt almsot from the very begining and failed to ever get me to care about the people in the film or the issues they were struggling with.

Title=Dominion: A Prequel to The Exorcist Score=9 Summary=A strong and subtle story, building heavily on the characters and in particular Merrin. Providing a lot more focus on his crisis of faith, the person he is, and his slow realisation on his first meeting with a Demon. A much better movie than the other Exorcist film. Also includes a short discussion of the Paul Schrader Q&A session afterwards.

Title=MirrorMask Score=4 Summary=A very weak story which develops little throughout, this movie is a visually driven film heavy with effects and many scenes with no real connection to the initial story. Good performances from the leads, but little enjoyment from the story.

Title=The Dark Score=6 Summary=A by the numbers scare movie for the first half, then the second turns into a creepy psychological horror that just doesn't quite hit the mark. The sheep are really not that scary, but Bean is superb once again with Bello providing an equally good performance, together they have a good onscreen chemistry. These two, and the last twenty minutes, really do bring the movie back from the brink.

Title=The Cave Score=5 Summary=Very little expectation going in to seeing The Cave. On the one hand I was quite excited about seeing Piper Perabo again (oh my goodess that's an attractive woman)... but other than that... there wan't much in the way of marketing to get me excited. It ended up being a little better than I thought... but even that's not saying much.

Title=The Brothers Grimm Score=4 Summary=The dialog in the film is a joke, the character direction was horrible, the visual effects look like they were done in 2001 and all of the supporting characters were such extreme 1 dimensional goof balls that I kept wishing I had to go to the bathroom to give myself a good excuse for leaving the theater if even for just a moment.

Title=Serenity Score=9 Summary=Sharp, clever and quick dialogue between well written characters in a hugely entertaining movie with loads of action. Very true to the original series, yet a bit darker with more complexity to some of the characters.