For all the digital glitter and anachronistic hip-hoppery that signifies our latest re-entry into Luhrman-land, The Great Gatsby itself takes fundamental inspiration from a black and white classic from 1941. Featuring a flashback framing device, a lonely and heartsick tycoon staring out of the window of a grotesque castle, and even a breathless deathbed “Daisy” […]
Speaking as someone whose taste for adventure doesn’t stretch much further than going to the dairy in the rain, the reckless self-endangerment represented by Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg’s Kon-Tiki was a genuine eye-opener. The bones of the story are well-known enough to anyone who built balsa models of Heyerdahl’s raft at primary school in […]
The 2009 Star Trek reboot went into production on the eve of the writers’ strike and therefore had no right to be as entertaining – or to make as much sense – as it did. In fact, it was so successful that it has become the gold standard of dormant franchise resuscitation and I’m hoping […]
It’s easy to laugh at ageing movie stars. Crumbs, when they make films like The Expendables they actively encourage us to make jokes about creaking joints and dicky hips. But let us pause for a moment and salute the longevity of one of the greatest movie stars there ever was, someone who was headlining box […]
Whatever they are paying Robert Downey Jr. to play Iron Man, it is is worth every penny. Iron Man 3, the third instalment in his own branch of the Marvel Universe series that also features Captain America, The Mighty Thor and The Hulk is hurtling towards a billion dollars of box office revenues and might […]
While original Die Hard director John McTiernan languishes in minimum security federal prison his heirs are keeping the action movie flame alive. Most recently, Antoine Fuqua’s Olympus Has Fallen might as well be called Die Hard at the White House as one man attempts to rescue the hostages held captive in the impregnable bunker beneath […]
Danny Boyle is a British film director with a quite extraordinary track record including Trainspotting, The Beach, 28 Days Later and multi-Academy Award winner Slumdog Millionaire. His latest film, Trance (reuniting him with Trainspotting and Shallow Grave writer John Hodge) opens on Thursday and the Light House Cuba have a special preview screening of it […]
After a splendid Wellington Film Festival last year, the New Zealand International Film Festival might be forgiven for putting their feet up and taking it easy but instead they have gone out of their way to produce another basket of goodies to fill the Easter weekend and beyond: the grandly titled World Cinema Showcase. Arguably […]
One of the most exciting and stimulating things about living in Wellington is the fact the our cinemas are continually reinvesting in their facilities and always trying to top each other in quality of fit out and customer experience. What have we done to deserve this!? This year the burghers of Miramar got the Ming […]
I’m old enough to remember when the Arts Festival was known archly as The New Zealand International Festival of the Arts. In recent years the name has been tidied up but the goal has remained the same – bring really cool, really great, international artists to Wellington and showcase their work alongside the best of […]