Review: Growing up through music
Surmounting the not considerable obstacle that French pop music makes John Denver sound like AC/DC, this Christmas crowdpleaser breathes new life into the girl-becomes-woman genre.
Surmounting the not considerable obstacle that French pop music makes John Denver sound like AC/DC, this Christmas crowdpleaser breathes new life into the girl-becomes-woman genre.
Charlie brown's return to the big screen, 25 years after the last Peanuts feature, is sure to charm and delight both newcomers and fans of Charles M. Schulz's iconic comic strip.
Victoria is a remarkable achievement, a visceral experience in which the technique never overwhelms substance. Highly recommended as one of the year's best.
I am Big Bird: The Caroll Spinney Story plays like an extended promo, washed with a score of elevator-music strings, and composed of so many talking-head snatches that it often feels like a trailer for itself.
The latest in the Star Wars saga has been put to the George Lucas test - and it passed.
The night Before reunites director Jonathan Levine with his 50/50 crew, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Seth Rogen, in a chaotic and raunchy comedy that takes place over one Christmas Eve in New York City.
If a teaser for Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice whet your appetite, the full-length trailer will have you on the edge of your seat.
Fans of the 1990s children's horror series Goosebumps will be thrilled with the first film adaptation of author R.L. Stine's popular series. Briskly paced, it also retains the balance of comedy and creepiness from the books.
Two great veteran actors from either side of the Atlantic do their best with frustratingly uneven material in the new film by Sorrentino, whose The Great Beauty won last year's foreign-film Oscar.
When writer-director Leslye Headland presented her second feature film, Sleeping with Other People, at the Sundance Film Festival, she described it as "When Harry met Sally for assholes". Turns out, that's an apt description.
You don't have to like cycling to find yourself leaning into the corners on The Program.
A sharp portrait of the agony and ecstasy of becoming yourself.
After four years, three films and reportedly over US$2.2 billion in worldwide box-office takings, author Suzanne Collins' disturbing young adult book trilogy comes to a grim and exhausting conclusion with The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2.
A budding young writer in need of life experience finds the perfect muse on the streets of New York; a sophisticated, older French woman who suggests they have a "cinq-a-sept", an affair that takes place between the hours of 5am and 7pm.
More than once in Michael Almereyda's playfully imaginative telling of the famous Stanley Milgram experiment, the film's subject walks through the corridors of Yale University musing direct to camera as an elephant lumbers by in the background.
When the Argentinian thriller The Secret in Their Eyes walked away with the 2010 Oscar for best foreign film.
This is reportedly the most expensive Bond movie ever. It's also the longest Bond film ever. It isn't however the best Bond movie ever - or of the Craig era either.
A coffee-break conversation at a climate-change conference in Wellington in 2006 was the beginning of this small but accomplished doco.
The first fruit of a co-production agreement between Australia and India, this cross-cultural love story follows a formulaic and predictable path.
Dynamic and passionate, thrumming with barely suppressed anger, this sleek American indie has the brains of a documentary, the soul of a moral fable and the beating pulse of a thriller.
Calling this latest collaboration, by director Noah Baumbach and star and co-writer Greta Gerwig a whirlwind of witty observations about the entitled middle class, is an understatement; it's a tornado.
The Ghost Dimension is set in 2013, when a new family move into a house and find a 1980s-era video camera and tapes.
Bridge of Spies is a dialogue-driven, handsome and detailed period piece, which also features conversations about America's constitution and civil liberties.
Burnt is not a film to watch on an empty stomach, writes Francesca Rudkin.
The Walk, a film based on Philippe Petit's 1974 high-wire walk between the World Trade Center towers, is more gimmickry than poetry, writes Peter Calder.
In the new version of the Kray twins story, the notorious gangsters spring to life fully formed.