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Review: Arrietty, Taken 2, On the Road, Life in Movement, Searching for Sugar Man, The Last Dogs of Winter and The Words

By Cinema and Reviews

After an intense week­end run­ning from pic­ture theatre to pic­ture theatre between – and some­times dur­ing – rain showers, I have now caught up on everything in cur­rent loc­al release. Except Tinker Bell and the Secret of the Wings but a Twitter cor­res­pond­ent assures me: “Just FYI my 5 year old great niece loved it so much she stood up at the end clap­ping & dancing…you should go you’ll love it ;)” and that review might just have to do for now.

Arrietty posterA little harder to track down than Tinker Bell, Madagascar 3 or Hotel Transylvania – but well worth the effort – is Arrietty, a Studio Ghibli anim­ated adapt­a­tion of The Borrowers, Mary Norton’s fam­ous children’s book about tiny people liv­ing under a house who are dis­covered by a frail young boy who needs a friend. Beautifully anim­ated – as always – and told with emo­tion and sim­pli­city, Arrietty is a fine altern­at­ive to those over-hyped Hollywood con­fec­tions. The ver­sion play­ing in Wellington is the English voiced one fea­tur­ing Saoirse Ronan, Olivia Colman and Mark Strong – much easi­er on the ears than the American voices and much easi­er to fol­low for the lit­tlies than the ori­gin­al Japanese.

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Review: Cowboys & Aliens

By Cinema and Reviews

Cowboys & Aliens posterDue to a parade of won­der­ful Film Festival screen­ings your cor­res­pond­ent was only able to get to one of this week’s new releases (and, thanks to the Empire’s fail­ure to open on Sunday morn­ing nearly didn’t make that one) so Glee: the 3D Concert Movie and rom-com Something Borrowed will have to wait until next week’s column. I’m sure you are breath­less with anti­cip­a­tion. But this means that Cowboys & AliensJon Favreau’s third com­ic book adapt­a­tion in a row after Iron Man 1 and 2 – gets the full review treat­ment. Does it deserve it? We shall see.

The scene is fron­ti­er New Mexico between the end of the Civil War and the arrival of the rail­road. A tiny little town, built for a gold rush that nev­er mater­i­al­ised, is only kept alive because of grumpy Harrison Ford’s cattle busi­ness. In the desert out­skirts Daniel Craig wakes up with amne­sia, a strange met­al brace­let and an abil­ity with unarmed com­bat that soon scores him a horse, a gun and a dog.

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