In what must be the most expensive recruitment drive ever, 70 million dollars has been spent on a movie that lets us know EVERY TEN MINUTES OR SO just how worthwhile/glorious life in the marines can be. The script and indeed Brian Tyler’s score hammer home this message with unceasing regularity…
Rating: 
Hoopla Factor: 
Continue reading Battle: Los Angeles
This really is a strange film. The historical sections are pitch perfect, and it’s such a fascinating story that it’s a pity they had to be sullied by the regular intrusions of the embarrassing present. Worse still, the final section of the film seems like it will never finish until, miraculously, it ends on an incredibly touching note.
Rating: Hoopla Factor: Continue reading Sarah’s Key
Like all good confined space thrillers, Buried uses its confined setting to the fullest, deftly taking us through every narrative possibility as Paul does everything he can to get out alive. There wasn’t a dull moment in this film – it moves at a cracking pace.
Rating: 
Hoopla Factor:
This is a truly brave film, and one that gives hope that films can be made the way their story demands, immune to the influence of what ‘will sell’. Cortez and Reynolds should be applauded.
Rating: 
Hoopla Factor: Continue reading Buried
Beattie has indeed taken much of the dialogue straight from the books, so perhaps this is a simply a case where some more creative rewriting needed to occur in the transition from book to screen. It is such a pity that the film falters in these few moments – and they are indeed only moments – when the rest is so wonderful.
Rating: 
Hoopla Factor: 
That he has managed to retain the quintessential Australian-ness of the story while aiming to produce a film with more than local appeal is quite impressive. The use of great music by local artists for the film’s soundtrack really helps.
Rating: Hoopla Factor: Continue reading Tomorrow, When the War Began
I can’t begin to describe how excited I was during the opening scenes of Lebanon. A movie entirely set inside an army tank? Awesome! We never get to see outside, except what the crew see through periscope thingy? Brilliant! Why has this film never been made before?
Rating: 
Hoopla Factor: 
Continue reading Lebanon
Foster conveys all this and more in a facial tick, or a look that could break hearts the world over. Above all else he is required to be taciturn, and were it not for his great talent there is no way his character could be so successfully conveyed.
Rating: Hoopla Factor: Continue reading The Messenger
The claustrophobia of being at war in such confined spaces is amplified by the danger of imminent discovery by Germans tunnelling in the opposite direction, or from collapse and suffocation under piles of dirt and rubble. The film succeeds in conveying this tension incredibly well.
Rating: Hoopla Factor:
Brendan Cowell again puts in a great performance. I suppose he doesn’t have quite the chiselled jaw for Hollywood, but then again Sam Worthington hasn’t yet made any particularly noteworthy impression with his chin in American films yet.
Rating: Hoopla Factor: Continue reading Beneath Hill 60
Some sequences are shot at night without any light source to allow the cameras to focus, resulting in a grainy, blurred image of someone chasing someone else, and then all sorts of hand-to-hand fighting and gunplay, and you simply can’t tell who is fighting whom, with what, and who’s winning.
Rating: 
Hoopla Factor: Continue reading Green Zone
There are a bunch of aerial dogfights which are incredible – a wonderful blend of CGI and traditional anime – and deserve to be watched on the big screen. Alas, whenever the film gets a chance to really do something thrilling, it takes the arthouse route and skips to the next scene.
Rating: Hoopla Factor: Continue reading The Sky Crawlers
The problems I have with Inglourious Basterds are the same ones I have with most of Tarantino’s work. He makes scenes, not movies. To be sure, they’re fantastic, brilliantly executed scenes most of the time, but I’ve yet to see a narrative of his that flowed all the way through.
Rating: Hoopla Factor: Continue reading Inglourious Basterds