If the Spider-Man tale is about anything, it’s about gawky youth and surging powers. The film makers know this and keep the tone skittish and fresh.
This is Scorsese with fire in his belly and Leonardo DiCaprio’s Walmart Gordon Gekko cranking up the laughs – a pantomime Goodfellas.
South Korean director Park Chan-wook makes his English-language debut with an outrageous quasi-remake of Hitchcock’s 1943 thriller Shadow of a Doubt.
Tehran-based filmmaker Ataollah Salmanian says "The General Staff" will be an appropriate response to Ben Affleck’s "ahistorical" thriller.
The movie adaptation of the novel ‘Cloud Atlas’ has been criticised by Asian-Americans for casting white Western actors in "yellowface" makeup.
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/ 23 December 2010
This year brought a new kind of hero as
<i>Kick-Ass</i> and <i>The Social Network</i> proved it’s the geeks who shall inherit the Earth.
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/ 5 December 2008
ON CIRCUIT: <i>The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas</i>, a story of the Holocaust told through the experiences of a young boy.
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/ 8 November 2008
MOVIE OF THE WEEK: Xan Brooks reviews <i>The Counterfeiters</i>, which won the Oscar for best foreign-language film this year.
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/ 8 September 2006
A new wave of movies is marking the rise of the ‘ordinary slob nerd’, writes Xan Brooks. This month saw the release of the final installment in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, awash with elves and hobbits and surely the most monumental nerd-fest of the lot.
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/ 3 February 2006
There are bigger issues than glitz and glam behind this year’s nominations, reports Dan Glaister and Xan Brooks.