Review: Rubber

(originally published Oct 2011) You know… sometimes as a reviewer a film comes along and challenges your ability to think and write cohesively because what was witnessed was so completely random. Rubber, follows a sentient killer psychic tyre, that wakes up in the American scrub-lands only to start popping small animals and people’s heads. Believe…

Review: The Visit

Director M. Night Shyamalan funded this small and unique film himself to regain “creative control”. Honestly, it isn’t half bad! To help their mother cope with a divorce and have fun with her life, two siblings go to spend a week living with their grandparents, the daughter attempting to film their experience to give their…

Review: The World’s End

The World’s End is a sad way to end Edgar Wright’s “Cornetto Trilogy”, precious few memorable moments and a lot of repetitive action filling the time. Six men are reunited by the nostalgia infused rantings of a drunken man-child named Gary King and set on an epic pub crawl in their old town from twenty…

Review: Kingsman – Secret Service

Matthew Vaughn continues his comic book adaptations after Kick Ass and X-Men: First Classwith this bloodied, tongue-in-cheek British spy action movie. A smart British youth who has found himself in hard times after the death of his father, but when an agent of a secret organisation requests he join the service he, and the other…

Review: A Serious Man

There’s nothing quite like watching a Coen Brothers’ film. A straight-laced, kind hearted father and husband working as a mathematician finds his life suddenly collapsing around him after a series of troubles. Without a sense of determination, faith or self, he begins to seek meaning from the madness. On paper, and in synopsis, A Serious…

Trilogy Review: Starship Troopers

Very loosely based off the novel by the same name, Starship Troopers was a pretty infamous film when I was growing up, but it has become a cult favourite of the science fiction genre. Unfortunately… people thought this lightning-in-a-bottle exploitation of Paul Verhoeven deserved a sequel… and another sequel… To this day I refused to…

Review: Guardians of the Galaxy (2D)

(I’d like to say that this is the first time on Cinema Cocoa that I got the image for this review months before. I just love that poster!) So in one grasp Marvel Studios attempts to draw all the loose ends developed over their Cinematic Universe so far together. What we get is Guardians of…

Review: Pain and Gain

You actually have to remind yourself this is a Michael Bay movie. Mark Wahlberg is Daniel Lugo, a bodybuilder and fitness trainer who, inspired by little more than movies, brings together two equally dimwitted friends in a bid to attain his American Dream. How? By kidnapping a man and stealing all of his money. But…

Review: Idiocracy

As a comedy, Idiocracy isn’t a blow-out winner, but as a film made in 2005 it is an alarmingly accurate, entertaining and almost sobering vision of how completely hopeless humanity’s future really is. Joe Bauers (Luke Wilson) is an incredibly average man, so average that he excels and fails at nothing, he lives shut away…

Review: The Grand Budapest Hotel

Director Wes Anderson has ever really wow’ed me with any of his previous works, often they are too wild and unprecedented, but with The Grand Budapest Hotel he has excelled. Our story begins from the perspective of a writer who, in visiting a rundown Hotel, meets the owner who tells a tale of the Hotel’s…