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Wild (6/10)

By Bart Hartgring
March 25, 2015
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Cheryl strayed from the path after her mother’s death and to find her way again she decides to hike 1100 miles to redemption along the Pacific Crest Trail.

It really is a roadtrip movie – well a hiking journey movie – and Cheryl’s experiences along the way are small, focusing on the here and now – be it meeting men she is not sure she can trust, various animals, or kind strangers. The storytelling is interspersed with flashbacks allowing us to learn a bit more about who she is and why she is on this hike.

Interstellar (9/10)

By Bart Hartgring
March 25, 2015
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It has been a long while since there has been a science fiction movie with this level of grand ambitions. The Director, Christopher Nolan, lists various movies that have inspired him for Interstellar, including Metropolis, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner. For me the more obvious comparison however is with Contact.

’71 (7/10)

By Bart Hartgring
March 18, 2015
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Jack O’Connel is the strong lead in ’71. He plays a British soldier, Gary, expecting to be stationed in Germany, but instead his unit ends up ‘helping’ in Belfast. Early in his deployment he accidentally gets separated from and then abandonded by his unit in a Belfast ghetto, leaving him to find a way to survive amongst ‘the Troubles’.

The Congress (4/10)

By Bart Hartgring
March 17, 2015
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The Congress sets out a future where live actors are no longer needed – Hollywood will just ‘scan’ the people they want and from there on in their digital alter-egos will do all the work.

A potentially interesting concept, with Robin Wright, Harvey Keitel and Paul Giamatti. Halfway through the movie switches style from live-action to animation, which turns out to be a defining love-it-or-hate-it moment. It didn’t work for me, and you lose interest in a concept and storyline that seems to go from interesting to silly in a matter of a couple of minutes…

Transcendence (5/10)

By Bart Hartgring
March 16, 2015
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There clearly is a trend of science-fiction more and more aspiring to enter the mainstream. Transcendence is another such attempt, using several big name stars like Johnny Depp, Paul Bettany and Morgan Freeman to reach a broader audience for its story.

Primer (8/10)

By Bart Hartgring
March 12, 2015
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Primer What happens if it actually works? 2004Drama, Science Fiction, Thriller Click an icon to see more Overview Friends/fledgling entrepreneurs invent a device in their garage that reduces the apparent mass of any object placed inside it, but they accidentally discover that it has some highly unexpected capabilities–ones that could enable them to do and […]

Upstream Color (5/10)

By Bart Hartgring
March 12, 2015
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Shane Caruth wrote, directed and acted in his debut movie Primer, which is quite an intriguing film. Upstream Color is his second movie, nine years later, which he again wrote, directed and stars in.

The first hour or so the movie goes down various tracks whilst nothing is obvious, nothing is explained, and not a lot is clear as to what is going on and why. This initially makes for an interesting and somewhat suspenseful enigma: it keeps you trying to figure out how things connect and where this might lead.

Cronos (4/10)

By Bart Hartgring
March 11, 2015
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I am not sure how I feel about this movie – Guillermo del Toro’s directorial debut and ‘Grand Prize’ Winner at Cannes 1993, about a magical device that can grant eternal life.

It starts out fairly interesting and the first half sets out teh relavtn characters and builds a decent plotline, even if the movie is incredibly slow.

Kill the Messenger (7/10)

By Bart Hartgring
March 4, 2015
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I always felt Jeremy Renner to be a B-list actor who got lucky. The Hurt Locker was great, but I thought that was more down to the script and photography than Renner’s acting; Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters was just a fun watch but too silly to remember, his role in The Avengers is fairly irrelevant, and The Bourne Legacy was just a disappointing movie all around.

Whiplash (8/10)

By Bart Hartgring
February 18, 2015
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An ambitious drummer goes to a prestigious conservatory where he meets an even more ambitious teacher. Which one of them turns out to be the bigger musical genious, the bigger egotistical maniac, or the arrogantly victorious hero in the end…?

The script is very tight and narrowly focused – probably fair to call it myopic – on these two leads. All other characters are just there in support of strengthening the focus on the battle between these two characters.