A very entertaining film about magicians staging a series of incredible feats of magic whilst robbing from the rich and giving to the poor. The film hosts an impressive cast with  Jesse Eisenberg (Didn’t he make facebook!), Mark Ruffalo, Woody Harrelson, Mélanie Laurent, Isla Fisher, Dave Franco, Michael Caine, and Morgan Freeman.

There are several very large scale scenes with very big and impressive magic performances which would not be out of place in any Las Vegas Casino. If you like to be stunned and tricked, this is the film for you. You are never really quite sure what is going on and just when you think you do, everything shifts around you.

Rest assured the film answers most of your questions by the time it ends, although I will warn you that the ending is a bit implausible!

A little gem of a film from the sixties starring an all-star cast of Gregory Peck, Richard Crenna, David Janssen, James Franciscus and Gene Hackman, I can see now where Tom Hanks pinched the idea for Apollo 13 from, as it was clearly a direct remake of this film.

What gives this film a lot of character is that it was made the same year as the original moon landing and it paints a less than rosy view of the space program as a whole: What if things go wrong and Astronauts end up Marooned as the title suggests?

In terms of sets and costume the film maintains an authenticity a director could only achieve by making it at near to the time it is set (I suppose that’s why Apocalypse Now is such a superior Vietnam War film).

Despite seeming a bit dated by the old space technology, this film remains well worth a watch.

A very underrated film that is very funny, Mail order Wife use the style of Mockumentary made famous by This is Spinal Tap to tell the story of a man purchasing a wife from Burma out of a catalogue.

The documentary follows the man (a doorman at a local building) meeting her at the airport and settling her in to his house. You have to start thinking something is wrong when he shows her how to scrub the toilet bowl and then how to feed his pet python with live rats!

Of course it gets worse, but I won’t ruin the surprise for you,

Just like Spinal Tap, the comedy’s brilliance here is in its subtlety and the major characters never really letting on that anything is particularly wrong or comedic. This film will keep you laughing right up to its last moments.

Just released on DVD Love thy neighbour (1973) is a rather interesting piece of history.

If you are old enough to have watched the TV series as I did (this film was its pilot) you will perhaps realise that these days it would not be considered very politically correct! Even though you could argue that clearly the shows writers were parodying racial strife in seventies Britain and showing up racists like Eddie Booth.

The premise is that Eddie Booth and his wife live in a council house. Next Door is Bill who is of West-African descent. The two wives Barbie and Joan get along fine, but the two boys are a microsm of the racial strife that existed in Britain at the time always bickering and throwing racial expletives at each other. Into the mix Eddie is the local union representative and constantly trying to justify his ridiculous racial theories alongside class politics…

This was an absolutely brilliant film in the ilk of Red Dawn (the original of course) with yet another stunning performance from rising star Saoirse Ronan in the title role.

Taken from an award-winning teen fiction book the story follows a nuclear strike and war in mainland Britain between British Soldiers (the good guys)  and some very Arab-terrorist looking people in black (the bad guys).

Don’t be fooled by the films beginning which resembles The Railway Children, the film soon gets going and pulls no punches. I wondered actually at times whether it was really suitable for teens as it got fairly graphic, then again I suppose these days with the Internet they’ve seen it all…

Unlike Red Dawn the film concentrates more on the affect on the populous of a war and the hardships they endure going from ordinary lives to surviving the horrors of war. No Heroic “Wolverines” here I am afraid, just people running away from terrifying circumstances.

Sweet Selena playing the bad girl

This film was a very good fast-paced action thriller with excellent performances from both Ethan Hawke and Selena Gomez.

Hawke, a former racing car driver, receives a phone call learning his wife has been kidnapped and will be harmed unless he drives a car according to instructions for some criminals. The car is fitted with camera’s so they can watch his every move. Along the way Gomez tries to Car jack him and ends up along for the ride.

The driving sequences in this film were literally breathtaking with hats off to the stunt team involved in the picture. In a lot of ways I was reminded of The Driver with Ryan O’Neal, but that’s hardly a bad thing!

In another instalment of the Fast and The Furious, this year we get Furious 6. It is hard to believe watching this film, that the franchise is about a group of Street Racers led by Vin Diesel getting up to a bit of mischief with muscle cars.

Furious 6 was more like a bond film with the crew pitched as some type of international mercenaries fighting another group of nasty street racers for Interpol (headed up by the Rock of course). Suddenly they have become experts with guns and explosives, computers, you name it; very little grease on their hands here. Back from the dead in a strange twist is Michelle Rodriguez and pretty much everyone from the original movies.

Whilst I enjoyed the film immensely I can’t help but think its kind of getting a bit far from the original idea (good thing in my case as not being a rev head the originals were fairly uninteresting). Muscle cars and rev heads was what gave the franchise the success it has had and I wonder whether its die-hard fans will like the new changes in Furious 6.

Kristanna Loken. The only thing really worth a look in this movie.

Many Words come to mind when I try to describe Bounty Killer, “Childish Violence”, “Comic Book Narrative” are some of them…

Essentially we are confronted with a post apocalyptic wasteland in which Bounty Hunters track down dead-or-alive the greedy corporate executives who brought about the destruction of the world. Now whilst this all sounded like a fairly good premise, when it came to being put into a film the result was an abysmal failure.

Cardboard characters walk their way though an hour and a half or so of fairly uninteresting action sequences and Tarantino-style unnecessary ultra-graphic-violence, give me Endgame any day! The Only mildly redeeming feature was the very beautiful Terminator Kristanna Loken getting around in some type of sixties Barbarella outfit.

This movie looked somewhat interesting in the vein of classic British Sci Fi (even though it is an American film) and this illusion remained for about the first 15 minutes of the film!

After that it quickly turned into a paranoid cold war drama with fairly uninteresting sequences and shaky sets. I won’t spoil the whole story for you by giving out too many details, but this is not exactly the best film ever made.

Having said that, it was not entirely unentertaining and maybe worth a peek on a wet Saturday afternoon.