Drooch

It starts brilliantly and for the first third of the film I was blissfully enjoying something I never expected to see - a new Indiana Jones film in league with it's predecessors. Then something bad happens - the script spirals out of control - the film loses it's soul but keeps on going and going until it reaches a misjudged climax. There's enough good stuff to make it worth watching, and it's GREAT to see Indy again - Harrison totally pulls it off - but with 18 years to play with they could have cooked up a much tighter script.

The film feels 3-dimensional to begin with and promises so much, but the rest seems like a montage of ideas with no through-line, it loses all grounding and becomes a cartoon. Characters start to behave inconsistently, subplots inexplicably vanish, action scenes escalate beyond physical reality. I wouldn't be surprised if Lucas has to answer for some of the more outrageous elements, including the crazy UFO stuff. I'd be intrigued to read the Darabont script that he vetoed...

The crystal skull is flaccid. The immortality-granting Holy Grail inspired us with awe in Last Crusade, here we learn very little about the 'power' granted by the skull and the potentially fascinating curse/blessings of ultimate knowledge go unexplored. As a result, this McGuffin lacks gravity and is hard to care about.

In fact, lack of weight characterises the latter portion of the film. There are few scary or dangerous moments which are needed to create the necessary sense of peril. Spielberg knows how to terrify an audience - dinosaurs, tripods, opening the Ark, choosing the WRONG grail - all made us sit up and prey for our heroes to survive - but the crystal skull and Russian villains are all too soft. In addition, the more ambitious action scenes are neutered by obvious CGI, which instantly plucks us out of the movie - I squirmed when Indy was about to get ground between a tank and a mountain in Last Crusade because he was stuck between real metal and real rock, replace those with CGI textures and all threat is lost.

The clear, wide cinematography of the earlier films is replaced with blooming white spaces and an overuse of close shots, which combine with choppy editing to create an unreal and messy feel to certain action scenes. It's not all bad - there are some typically great Spielberg flourishes and long takes filled with inspired camera moves, especially early on, but as the script loses clarity so do the pictures. There is a sense that Spielberg wants to just get things over with, hence the reportedly quick shoot.

As mentioned, Ford is on superb form as Indy, and the buzz of seeing him back in the hat carried me through some of the film's weaknesses. La Boef is also strong and his banter with Indy is a highlight of the film. Ray Winstone starts strong but plays the same notes until it becomes apparent that his character is underwritten. It's a pleasure to see Karen Allen again and most of her rekindled sparkery with Indy is fun, but occasionally feels forced and there's little for her to do after saying 'hi'. John Hurt and Jim Broadbent do what they can with, again, underwritten 2D characters. Blanchet's villain is striking but lacks humanity and clear motivation, and her psychic powers are flushed down the toilet of potentially interesting subplots shortly after they're mentioned, and she never gets to face-off against Indy in a meaningful final showdown of clashing ideologies which could potentially further the film's theme, because the film struggles to find a theme, because the script is a hodge-podge of ideas from multiple screenwriters. It all comes back to that damned script, and I really want to see what Darabont had to offer, which Spielberg apparently loved.

When Spielberg publicly said to fans that he's 'making this film for YOU' it sounded like a good thing. I now realise he really meant - 'the reason I didn't pull the plug on this was for YOU'. After 18 years of tussle with George he seems to have finally given in and made it, deciding that the benefits outweighed the costs. He's right, and the film's merits outweigh its shortcomings. It's flawed - it warps from a charming little film into something bloated and insane, like Lucas, but it's certainly an Indiana Jones film.

Garland described his script as a 'love letter' to the classics, particularly Alien, 2001 and Solaris. Sunshine may not spend as much time pondering but it still has plenty of worthy ideas, and with today's special effects is able to convince the modern moviegoer in a way the oldies, through no fault of their own, struggle to do. As a story, you would be hard pressed to find a more consistently tense, gripping ride.

As with the classics, the film uses outer space as a field in which to explore the human subconscious. In this case, a journey to re-ignite the dying sun becomes metaphor for a meeting with our creator. The sun is the source of life and totally ingrained into our very being, what happens when a team of astronauts and scientists get RIGHT UP CLOSE to it? How does the mind cope with such unimaginable power? Have they found God? Science and religion are forced to share a room, where no-one can hear you scream… The film will have you thinking long after the credits roll, and even if the subtler messages are lost on some audiences, the awesome visual rendering of the sun will emblazon itself on any brain. Never before has our burning star been portrayed with such hypnotic beauty; but Boyle also shows us the dark side of the sun – a savage entity, unkind to man. Sequences which combine this beatific majesty and blood-curdling horror are hard to forget. Special mention should go to John Murphy for his exceptional score in these moments.

The actors are completely convincing as the ship's crew, each character is revealed through the various crises that threaten their mission, some overcome their problems, others are destroyed by them. Chris Evans is particularly strong as the hot-headed but logical Mace who develops a grudging respect for Cillian Murphy's sensitive physicist Capa. Hiroyuki Sanada is also excellent as the ship's captain. The heated scientific and moral debates amongst the crew are some of the most effective scenes in the film, and contrast brilliantly with the dreamy visuals of the mostly dialogue-free final act.

The tension throughout the story is almost unbearable. Once Garland and Boyle setup the stakes – the very existence of mankind – they have us in the palm of their hand. The film wisely starts in media res, just as contact with Earth has been lost, and everything now hinges on this fragile crew in a flimsy ship. Everything that can go wrong does as the filmmakers cook up obstacle after obstacle, it should descend into farce but the credibility of the performances holds everything together, right up to the nail-biting climax, although you'll probably be up to your elbows by then.

Sunshine suffered at the box office due to poor marketing and a cinema-going audience increasingly consisting of Attention Deficit Disorder suffering apes, but I hope it becomes the DVD cult classic it deserves to be.

As a stand-alone film it was far better than I initially feared, and the action was very well handled with occasional flashes of Die Hard-quality genius - inventive setups with ultra-tense close-shaves (the lift shaft being the best). They were nothing like the over-stylised MTV mush sequences I feared, so I apologise to Wiseman for my nasty words about his action choreography over the last year.

Unfortunately, the same can't be said for his story and character work. The plot was riddled with holes and the 'characters' rarely behaved like human beings. That's fine in itself but this film carried the 'Die Hard' tag and that means it needs to respect an intelligent, mature audience.

McClane was uneven, one minute he's a cuddly wisdom-dispensing Dad and the next he's brutalising a woman to death then repeatedly teasing her boyfriend for his loss who, despite being a psychopath, doesn't immediately kill McClane's daughter out of revenge.

Ironically, the chain smoking alcoholic drenched in blood from With A Vengeance was far more humane and, despite his potty mouth, a much better role model for the PG-13 kids this film was clearly targeting from the get-go.

Bruce, however, does what he can with the material and, between the corny dialogue which tried to probe the hero's psychology in the same cack-handed way that the Brosnan Bond scripts did, there were real McClane moments (his chuckles after killing difficult terrorists, his thuggish fighting techniques), but he was far more fascinating in the earlier films where we watched his genius rather than listen to him talk about it.

Justin Long was surprisingly good and non-annoying despite his presence reeking of the studio's insistence on a heavy teen presence for maximum market appeal. He cracked me up a few times, especially his comment when the bad-guys brought him out of the lift. Mary Elizabeth Winstead was also good as Lucy but was clearly shoehorned into the script at the last minute and was underused. She also suffered from Wiseman and Bomback's insensitivity for internal human logic - she's clearly feisty and punchy yet doesn't make a sound when Gabriel orders the jet to target her dad in the truck.

Which brings me to Timothy Olyphant. The guy's a good actor and was superb as the villains in Go, Scream 2 and The Girl Next Door but here he's totally nonthreatening. One almost feels sorry for him as McClane, now a terminator relishing the capacity for murder his total invulnerability affords him, marches unstoppably to kill Gabriel while, as mentioned before, teasing him about his dead partner.

The climax was pumped and tense and I quite liked McClane shooting through himself but the censoring of 'mother *beep* with a gunshot was as insulting as all the obvious re-dubbing I noticed throughout the film. There'll be an unrated DVD with the original language and GCI blood but you can't polish a turd.

A hollow collection of 'good-bits', some of them good enough to be worthy of Die Hard but ultimately there were too many jumps in logic, internal and external, for me to suspend disbelief. As I said before, I don't have problems with such films and this was an undeniably enjoyable 2 hours, but the Die Hard banner is reserved for superior quality adult entertainment and this fell short. Congratulations to Wiseman for upgrading from a Paul W S Anderson to a Jonathan Mostow but please hone your craft somewhere other than on the Die Hard pitch. Get McTiernan out of prison, get a good screenwriter (eg Shane Black) and give McClane his brain and balls back for Die Hard 5.

This film holds you in a state of confused suspense, throwing up questions and teasing you with answers until the revelatory ending. Director Adrian Lyne stimulates the right-brain with abstract images and sounds while providing just enough logic to keep you engaged - you're trying to piece together the jigsaw while wandering what the hell is going on, it's a strangely engrossing experience.

It's difficult to talk about this film without spoiling it so I will be vague and say it's essentially about letting go in order to move on. It succeeds by immersing you in the experience of this - by the end you have learnt what it is saying about the human condition through feeling it, not being told it - which is exactly how good storytelling should work. It takes you to some very dark places - I watched it alone at night and was terrified, but it's far from gratuitous, the story depends on it.

If done badly this film could have been a real mess, but the quality of direction, acting and all the other components see it through, and it deserves classic status.

This film demonstrates what little is needed to create gut-wrenching suspense - just with two characters stuck in a house, this story will totally absorb you, terrify you, and have you dripping with perspiration in a way that the modern explosive action movie could only hope to achieve.

As with all the best Rob Reiner films, you get a very polished product - careful direction, including cinematography and music, and flawless acting. Kathy Bates is up there with Hopkins' Lecter and Joe Pesci's evil gangster characters in her portrayal of Annie Wilkes - a cross between the sweetest nurse you could ever imagine, and Satan.

Reiner and screenwriter Goldman crank up the suspense with skill, pushing it as far as possible while keeping things plausible, so that by the time you reach the 'hobbling' scene you are going to undergo one of the most harrowing experiences of your life. This is an awesome, powerful piece of entertainment and a true modern classic.

The is easily the best courtroom drama I have ever seen and one of the best films I have ever seen. Totally absorbing with a breathtaking climax. It is directed with expert precision - Reiner squeezes career- best performances from Cruise, Nicholson, Moore, hell - the whole damn cast is brilliant.

It can be demanding in its expectation of a quick-thinking viewer who can remember many characters' names but those who pay attention will be rewarded. Even if you're a little slow, like I was when I first watched the film, the dramatic punches and boiling hot conflict are clear and powerful enough to keep you utterly gripped. The final showdown between Cruise and Nicholson is a textbook example of genius film-making.

What amazes me about Reiner is his excellence in any genre he picks. He is a director who works very hard. Look at his two preceding films - Misery, one of the very best horror/thrillers ever. When Harry Met Sally, possibly the best romantic comedy ever and the only one a man can completely enjoy. And here he tackles courtroom drama with the same obsessive commitment to perfection - and succeeds.

Flatliners has all the ingredients of a good Joel Schumacher film - intelligent, youthful characters, stunning cinematography, a gripping story, and excellent performances. It's escapist fun but it's done very well and resonates with a positive spiritual message despite the unnerving precedings.

Schumacher has a knack for spotting talented young actors, and all of the main five here have gone on to greater things (see the cast list). Their believable performances help to raise this movie well above average. Kiefer Sutherland shines in his egotistical med-student role.

The cinematography really stimulates the right side of the brain, which is what I love about Schumacher; his use of light and location create images that stick. A disturbing nightmarish atmosphere is created which unsettles you while you watch the film and haunts you when you go to bed - reminded me of The Lost Boys.

This is a film that takes an awesome premise - curious students want to find out what's after death, and successfully follows it through into a scary, gripping tale of redemption. One of Schumacher's best; highly recommended.

This is an example of a perfectly crafted film. Every aspect of its creation - direction, acting, writing, scoring, editing, serves the story being told. It hooks you and takes you on a totally absorbing ride with a grand finale that will leave you buzzing. When you look at your watch you won't believe 2 1/2 hours has passed.

Pacino carries the movie with one of the best performances ever put on film. Like Anthony Hopkins' Hanibal Lector in The Silence Of The Lambs, this kind of acting is raw and utterly hypnotic.

Martin Brest directs with detail and confidence, you feel you're in good hands. The touching moments, and there are many, never come off as schmaltz; the moments that stretch believability stay just on the right side of that line through this sturdy, very well-handled direction.

When it's all over you'll feel you have just digested the perfect celluloid meal - very full and very satisfied.

The Matrix will undoubtedly be hailed as a truly classic movie for years to come, reaching levels close to that of Star Wars. The two films (or sets of films) are both packed with spiritual truth, accounting for their timeless quality. It's the same reason we still love Shakespeare.

When I first watched The Matrix something about the central ideas rang true inside me, they really hit home and intrigued me. (I'm aware that many people will read this and think I'm talking c**p but hear me out) in an attempt to find out more I studied various belief systems concerning 'reality' and the implications of fully controlling one's perception of it, eliminating doubt and fear, through pure belief in Self. The whole thing has led me into an intense inner journey and a total reassesment of life and its purpose. So Cheers to The Matrix for triggering the whole thing off. Whenever I watch it now I discover something new.

In addition to all of that, the film is utterly stunning as a piece of visual entertainment. The fluid Woo-style violence is a pleasure to watch and the close-shave action sequences staple you to your seat. I love the way the first half of the film feeds you the theory and the second half treats you to the practice. This movie went beyond thought-provoking - I left that theatre a changed man.

It may be dressed as a big, fat, money-hoarding, film studio product but the Wachowski's are simply using that as an effective vehicle through which to communicate this spiritual message to millions of people. Incredible.

This is an incredible piece of entertainment. Perhaps people attack it because it fails to meet certain expectations that one might associate with a 'Mission Impossible' film, and as a sequel it hardly remains very faithful to the prequel.

Taken for what it is - a non-stop thrill ride of poetic action sequences filled with beautiful music, stunning cinematography, sexy stars and plot surprises - it cannot be faulted. If, on the other hand, none of this appeals to you then you should not expect to enjoy MI:2, but at least give it credit for succeeding in its intentions.

John Woo's visuals blend harmoniously with Hans Zimmer's etherial score throughout the entire movie and it becomes apparent that this is a real work of art, it just happens to be packaged in the 'Mission Impossible' framework. This framework generates expectations. My advice is to let go of your expectations and focus on what this film is trying to do, and you will not be disappointed.