Hungry for a new franchise?

Jennifer Lawrence leaped to fame after her tremendous performance in the 2010 Oscar nominated film Winter’s Bone, since then Lawrence has starred in a few big budget films including X-Men: First Class and of course The Hunger Games which looks set to become the biggest role of her career as the film is based on the first of a series of novels which are hugely popular and successful among the teenage demographic.

21 Jump Street review.

Based loosely on the 80s TV show of the same name, 21 Jump Street concerns two idiotic cops, Morton Schimidt (Jonah Hill) and Greg Jenko (Channing Tatum), who are sent undercover to a local school to uncover the suppliers and dealers of a drug that killed a student. In a Freaky Friday style role reversal the pair goes back to school to discover that the attributes to make one popular has changed (to the shock and disgust of Greg Jenko who blames Glee for such a change). Written by Michael Bacall (Scott Pilgrim and Project X) and directed Phil Lord and Chris Miller (Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs) 21 Jump Street is great fun with a truck load of laughs, and 21 Jump Street is the funniest comedy since The Hangover.

Straw Dogs (2011) review.

The 1971 original version of Straw Dogs is perhaps the most notorious film of the 70s (A Clockwork Orange and The Exorcist are strong competitors for such a title) and of Sam Peckinpah’s career, banned under the 1984 Video Recording act of 1984 Straw Dogs is one of the most shocking films of its time, most shocking for that ambiguous rape sequence. Very few directors depicted, or even embraced violence, in the way Peckinpah did and the 1971 Straw Dogs remains one of the greatest explorations of violence; however the remake, a reasonably well made film, isn’t nearly as shocking.

Anonymous, The Muppets and Chronicle.

Conspiracy theories are always floating about, much of these conspiracy theorists believe that 9/11 was a government planned operation, the moon landing was faked and Shakespeare was a fraud and never wrote his own plays.  The final conspiracy theory is the focus of Roland Emmerich’s film Anonymous which so convoluted, dull and unconvincing that it will not even convince the most gullible of us into believing that Shakespeare was a fraud.

Awaken for The Awakening

The Awakening is one those films that will find a home as a DVD rather than in a theatrical release, however the film did get a theatrical release in November, but a very short one as the film made a loss, yet The Awakening may recoup some of its loss as it may grow into one of those cult movies.

Searching for the greatest Western? This may be one of them.

John Ford is often regarded as one the finest filmmakers ever, he is a winner of four Best Director Oscars (a record) and is Orson Wells’ greatest influence. Ford is best known for his Westerns, and The Searchers is regarded as his greatest film of his career and thus the best collaboration between himself and John Wayne.  It’s the brilliance of so many factors that range from Winton C. Hoch’s incredible cinematography, Ford’s faultless direction and Wayne’s stunning performance that makes The Searchers the genre defining film it is.