(UK) Musical/Drama. Directed by Tom Hooper. Starring Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, Anne Hathaway, Eddie Redmayne, Helena Bonham Carter, Sacha Baron Cohen. Category IIA. 157 minutes. Opened Dec 25.
(USA) Action/Crime. Directed by Christopher Nolan. Starring Christian Bale, Tom Hardy, Gary Oldman, Anne Hathaway, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine, Marion Cotillard. Category IIB. 163 minutes. Opened Jul 19.
(USA) Directed by Lone Scherfig. Starring Anne Hathaway, Jim Sturgess, Patricia Clarkson, Rafe Spall, Romola Garai, Jodie Whittaker, Tom Mison. Category IIA.
With two breathtaking leads and an engaging storyline taken straight out of a best-selling novel, “One Day,” on its surface, has all the trappings of a blockbuster. But this drama-filled tale of two star-crossed lovers sounds much better on paper than on a shiny silver screen.
(USA) Directed by Edward Zwick. Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Anne Hathaway, Oliver Platt. Category IIB.
(USA) By far Tim Burton’s best film in a long, long time after lackluster projects like Big Fish (2003) and the half-baked musical Sweeney Todd (2007), Alice in Wonderland, based on the Lewis Carroll classic of the same name, is a lot of fun, with flashes of comic spark, great 3D effects (in the vein of Avatar, but more playful), great costumes and overall spiffy pacing—Burton hardly wastes any time and gets the ball rolling in the weird and wonderful Wonderland (or rather, Underland), where the film is set.
(USA) Yes, a wedding takes place. But this film isn’t about one. What it is instead is a marvelously constructed flick by Academy Award-winning director Jonathan Demme (Silence of The Lambs) about addiction, family dysfunction and acceptance.
Category IIB. “Get Smart” isn’t as dumb as you might expect. It’s not all that dated either, considering the film takes its cue from Mel Brooks and Buck Henry’s Cold War spoof series. The TV show ran in America the 60s, finally making its way to Hong Kong screens some twenty years later (and you thought the time lag for “Heroes” was bad). Granted, Maxwell Smart’s signature shoe phone may look pointless in an age of mobiles the size of credit cards.
(UK) Julian Jarrold’s (Kinky Boots) second feature film delivers a rather plain biographical portrait of how Jane Austen’s love and life came to be the inspiration for her hit novel, Pride and Prejudice. Austen fans will be no strangers to the familiar themes of marriage, money, family and social class featured in this film.
If at least one fabulous outfit in this movie does not move you, then you have no soul. Or perhaps taste. “The Devil Wears Prada” evolved from the best-selling book of the same name in which a young assistant is hounded and harassed by a vicious magazine editor. The thin veneer of fiction did little to disguise the fact that author Laura Weisberger spent a year as the assistant to notorious US Vogue editor, Anna Wintour.
Havoc is a complete waste of our time and the cast and crew’s talent.
If The Offspring’s hit song “Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)” was made into a movie, it’d probably turn out just like Havoc—a film that is supposed to be some sort of social commentary, but really is just a glossy piece of fluff.
