Further details of the animosity between Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy have been detailed in a new book about the making of George Miller’s 2015 action blockbuster Mad Max: Fury Road. The co-stars were known to have a frosty relationship through the lengthy shoot in the Namibian desert, but Kyle Buchanan’s new book Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road suggests...
Swiftly doing away with any extraneous guff, the title of Channing Tatum’s to-the-point co-directorial debut Dog doesn’t need a journey, a way home or even a purpose, it just needs a dog. So dog lovers eager for a dog movie primarily about a dog will be reassured by the knowledge that Dog does feature plenty of dog but they might be a little surprised about what else the film has to offer, an odd...
There are shades of Griffin Dunne’s underappreciated romantic comedy Addicted to Love in Amazon’s slick Valentine’s offering I Want You Back, stories of dumpees refusing to take no for an answer. But while there was a dark undercurrent disrupting the cutesy sight of Meg Ryan and Matthew Broderick flirting in Manhattan way back when, the Big Time Adolescence director Jason Orley is less interested...
An expert in intimate partner violence called to give evidence in Johnny Depp’s defamation lawsuit against Amber Heard has testified that her evaluation of the actor revealed two psychiatric diagnoses – borderline personality disorder and histrionic personality disorder. Depp’s witness, Shannon Curry, said that the diagnosis came from examination of Heard’s previous psychological assessments...
If you’re a millennial or have parented one, you know the look: advertisements with shirtless men, sculpted abs above low-cut jeans, a melange of thin and tan and young white bodies in minimal clothing. A store at the mall mostly obscured by heavy wooden blinders, music pulsing from within. Faded jeans and polo shirts in middle and high school, all featuring the ubiquitous moose.White Hot: The...
Maybe a little unexpectedly, Amazon Studios have given us a very watchable and classily upscale espionage drama-thriller in the spirit of John le Carré. Danish film-maker Janus Metz Pedersen directs and Olen Steinhauer adapts his own much-admired spy novella, centred on two former lovers in the cloak and dagger business who meet for dinner in a chi-chi Californian restaurant. The story is in fact...
There’s an adequately scattered trail of breadcrumbs running throughout the brisk Netflix thriller Intrusion that starts us off in one subgenre before leading us somewhere entirely different. It’s not that either place is particularly original or that the reveal is all that revealing (your overall enjoyment will depend on how much deja vu you’re able to stomach in one sitting) but there’s simple...
At one moment in this very respectful film, a worried supporting character says: “I can’t do this any more.” Maybe none of us can. The spoofability of music biopics has been a known quantity for so long that perhaps, through some quirk of the collective creative unconscious, they have just reabsorbed the cliches, reinforced and clarified them as a proven formula for success. But what if the...
Remember sex at the movies? It wasn’t all that long ago – the 90s, maybe even the early aughts – that studios believed in the narrative utility and simple entertainment value of watching professionally good-looking people engaged in acts of intimacy. Decades of chastened blockbuster heroes, their ascent at the expense of the mid-budget character pieces for grownups that have all but gone extinct...
Carlo Collodi’s 19th-century tale The Adventures of Pinocchio has cast a long shadow over cinema, inspiring everything from a 1911 Italian live-action silent to Matteo Garrone’s 2019 Pinocchio, via such diverse fare as Disney’s 1940 animation and Spielberg’s futuristic 2001 sci-fi AI: Artificial Intelligence. A Guillermo del Toro stop-motion adaptation is also forthcoming. In the meantime we have...