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jacques tati

Review: Transformers- Dark of the Moon, The Illusionist, Beyond, Summer Coda and Kawasaki’s Rose

By Cinema and Reviews

Transformers: Dark of the Moon posterTransformers: Dark of the Moon had the best teas­er trail­er of the year: a bril­liantly sus­pense­ful recre­ation of the first Moon land­ing and the Apollo 11 crew’s dis­cov­ery of a crashed ali­en space­craft on the hid­den side. It was two and a half minutes of superb cinema and I allowed myself a glim­mer of hope that maybe, just maybe, this third Transformers movie might not be the total dis­aster that the oth­er two have been.

Well, I have been to the Dark Side now and can report that all that hope was tra­gic­ally mis­placed. Transformers 3 is as stu­pid and out of con­trol as all the oth­ers. Even con­sid­er­ing the franchise’s neg­li­gible com­mit­ment to its own tor­tured intern­al logic the film is an utter shambles.

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Review: Robin Hood, The Secret in Their Eyes & four more ...

By Cinema and Reviews

Robin Hood posterWhen my usu­al movie-going part­ner was offered the chance to see the new Robin Hood her first ques­tion was “Who is play­ing Robin?” When I told her that it was Strathmore’s finest son, Russell “Rusty” Crowe, she declined sug­gest­ing some­what unchar­it­ably that he was prob­ably bet­ter suited to play­ing Friar Tuck (or at a pinch Little John). Her favour­ite Robin is the 80s be-mulletted Michael Praed from the tele­vi­sion. Mine is a toss-up between the “fant­ast­ic” sly fox in the 1973 Disney ver­sion, John Cleese in Time Bandits and Sean Connery in Robin and Marian, so Rusty and dir­ect­or Ridley Scott had a moun­tain to climb before the open­ing cred­its even rolled.

This new Robin Hood is a pre­quel (or an ori­gin story in the com­ic book par­lance). On his way back from the Crusades with Richard the Lionheart, Robin Longstocking (sorry, Longstride) heads to Nottingham to return a sword. In Richard’s absence, England has fallen in to fin­an­cial and polit­ic­al ruin and the French are plot­ting to fill the void with an army mass­ing off the coast and spies in the court.

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