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Lost in Darkness: The Cruel Post-war Germany of Finsterworld
Finsterworld by Frauke Finsterwalder is a movie that tells a lot about Germany to foreigners as well as to the homegrown. Scripted by the director’s husband, the renowned Swiss author Christian Kracht, Finsterworld provides a broad kaleidoscope of German life today. Through several entangled stories the viewer is drawn into a world of ugliness, fetish, […]
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Journey Into Space: Reawakening the Giant in J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek: Into Darkness
In 2009, the Star Trek reboot by J.J. Abrams clearly divided the devout ‘trekkies.’ The picture shed a different light on several beloved characters from the original television and movie series – including a new version of Spock who actually showed some emotions and an older ego of the same Vulcan contributing to the creation […]
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Money for Nothing: Martin Scorsese Makes Leonardo DiCaprio The Wolf Of Wall Street
After some rather unconventional career choices lately, Martin Scorsese has finally returned to the world he knows best – that of the real-life gangsters transported to the big screen. For The Wolf Of Wall Street, he has also brought back his favorite actor of the last decade and a half, Leonardo DiCaprio. This time, however, […]
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The Golden Mile: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost & Edgar Wright Celebrate The World’s End
Acting duo Simon Pegg and Nick Frost have worked together on and off the screen ever since the British late 1990s cult sitcom Spaced. With the zombie spoof Shaun Of The Dead, comedians the two and their director friend from the same show, Edgar Wright, entered the film landscape with a bang in 2004. Three […]
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Fun in Space: Robert Rodriguez’s Machete Kills Not Only in This World
There were times when Machete was but a bloodthirsty creature from one of the many fake trailers for the Grindhouse double-dip of Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof and Planet Terror by his old friend Robert Rodriguez. Yet a full-blown effort by fans eventually forced the hands of the two filmmaking buddies, and the character re-emerged as […]
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Google is Your Friend: Shawn Levy’s The Internship, Or a Commercial of a Different Kind
‘Frat Pack’ members Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson have been partners in crime on several comedy projects in the past, most notably as the genuinely funny womanizing Wedding Crashers. So on paper, their latest collaboration, The Internship, directed by Shawn Levy and co-penned by Jared Stern and no other than Vaughn himself, sounds like a […]
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Screaming in Digital: Pixar Takes Us to College in Monsters University
Ever since John Lasseter’s Toy Story in 1995, the Disney-owned Pixar Studios have been leading the charge when it comes to computer-generated animation movies. Like the parent company, however, the CGI pioneers have been struggling in recent years – hitting rock bottom with head honcho Lasseter’s Cars 2 in 2011. Despite Brave winning the Oscar […]
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The Millionaire Waltz: Rekindling the ‘Roaring Twenties’ in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby
With his leading role in Baz Luhrmann’s modern version of Romeo & Juliet, Leonardo DiCaprio burst onto the Hollywood scene in grand style in 1996. So when the news spread that the charismatic superstar and the director of the Oscar-winning musical Moulin Rouge! would reunite for an adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel The […]
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Man on a Mission: The Post-Apocalyptic Tom Cruise of Joseph Kosinski’s Oblivion
There once was a time when science-fiction films were innovative and ahead of their time. Back then, even B-movies could attract audiences because they had something to say, despite their overall trashy appearance. Nowadays, it sometimes feels as if major studios seem to be more interested in shelling out large sums for rather pedestrian works […]
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Father to Son: Passing the Action Torch in John Moore’s A Good Day To Die Hard?
‘I fought with you, fought on your side,’ Freddie Mercury once sang in an early Queen song called “Father To Son.” In 2007, a then 52-year old Bruce Willis already played action hero John McClane as a daddy on a mission to save his child in Live Free Or Die Hard. Rescuing his daughter Lucy […]
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Unleashed in the East: Kung-Fu Meets Grindhouse in RZA’s The Man With The Iron Fists
It’s no secret that Django Unchained mastermind Quentin Tarantino is an avid fan of all things kung-fu, martial arts, and grindhouse. Therefore it doesn’t come as too much of a surprise that he would give his name to a movie called The Man With The Iron Fists co-written by his protégé Eli Roth, who once […]
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‘Argo F*ck Yourself’: The 85th Annual Academy Awards Coverage
Hollywood is clearly an appreciation society, and with the 2013 Oscars, the industry’s season of appreciating itself has just come to a close – for now. Unlike a year ago, when The Artist by Michel Hazanavicius and Hugoby Martin Scorsese scooped up five of the prestigious awards each, there were no clear-cut winners this time […]