I knew what I was letting myself in for. When I saw The Notebook I cried for half an hour and Dear John was just as emotional. I knew as soon as I read the name ‘Nicholas Sparks’ on the posters that Safe Haven would make me cry. What I hadn’t expected was for it to not make me cry most of the way through. You know when you get towards the end of a movie and you know it’s starting to wrap up? That was happening and I hadn’t cried at all, and I was just waiting for it to end so I could put it down as ‘Good but not as emotional as I expected.’ Then… oh lordy… about fifteen or twenty minutes towards the end it was like Sparks realised this, and decided to pummel my heart to make up for it.
Best Bits: The feels. OOHHHH GOD, THE FEELS.
Definitely one of the weirder movies I’ve seen this year. India, the girl you see on all the posters, is strange. And when her father dies and her weird uncle moves in with her and her mother, we see that she’s not even the strangest one in the family. There’s a lot of tension and suspicion and mystery, and a substantial dose of weird sexual scenes.
Best Bits: The acting from both Mia Wasikowska and Matthew Goode and their unsettling chemistry was really good in a creepy way.
I’ll admit, I got confused and remained confused for the first half hour or so. It took a while for me to sort it all out in my head. The story, much like the book (I’m told) is highly philosophical and confusingly complex, and while the movie runs on a little too long for my liking (at least, for a movie that confuses me) I did still enjoy it.
Best Bits: At the end you’re shown all of the characters in the movie played by each actor, and I hadn’t actually guessed a lot of them. That’s how good their acting, along with wardrobe and makeup, really was.
A lot of people didn’t like this one, but I loved it. I usually roll my eyes when another movie is made about another old children’s story, but this one is different. This one is about what happens after Hansel and Gretel kick the witch’s ass and escape. Did you know they turned to a lifelong profession of witch hunting? No? You do now!
Really, though, as long as you don’t take your movies too seriously you should enjoy this one.
Best Bits: Just seeing the brother and sister duo kicking ass with weapons they never told you about as a kid.
I’m no a huge James Franco fan, but I adore Mila Kunis. With the combination of Mila and Oz I had very high expectations for this movie, and I wasn’t disappointed. I went in expecting a slightly-grown-up kids movie. And that is where a lot of people were disappointed. The trailer did make it seem like a darker, edgier Oz story for adults, but it wasn’t. I know several people who complained that they didn’t like it because it was too childish. I can see why, but it didn’t affect me in the slightest. I loved it. I almost went to see it a second time in 3D because it was so beautifully done, too.
Best Bits: [Spoiler!] When Theodora (Mila) turns into the wicked witch. They tried to make her ugly, I know, but she just looked kinda cute to start with. She doesn’t have the right face shape to be all angles and anger. However, she acted like a crazy witch and the cuteness didn’t last long.
Honestly, I couldn’t remember what Arbitrage was about, so I looked it up. And I still can’t remember much of it. It was your average, sort of decent drama movie about a guy who was rich and then ran his company into the ground but couldn’t tell anyone so he started doing illegal financial things.
Best Bits: I’d be lying if I said I could remember any…
Now, here we have a good movie. Side Effects is about a woman who is prescribed a new experimental drug by her psychiatrist. At first, it works, but then she starts having, well, side effects, and crazy things start happening. Things that she does but can’t remember doing, and none of it is good. It has more twists and turns than a portion of curly fries, and is just as tasty.
Best Bits: The special seasoning.
Very funny and slightly unpredictable, which was nice. It is yet another alien story, but one that cannot be taken very seriously. Fair warning: the CGI is terrible. I had no idea that it was set in Dublin before I went in, which possibly made it funnier to me, seeing a dating couple in two or three locations on the one night that take about twenty minutes to half an hour to walk between, and their ice cream hadn’t melted.
Best Bits: [Spoiler!] Seeing the Spire explode out of the ground like a rocket. That was fun.
A remake of the 1984 original, which I haven’t seen. The only reason I went to see it was Chris Hemsworth. In case you hadn’t noticed already, there are two reasons I will go to see a movie. One, it’s a good movie. And two, it has… nice things to look at.
The movie itself was actually pretty good. A bunch of young adults flee their town when North Korea invades and while they have time to assess their situation, decide to fight back. Anarchy ensues. It’s fun.
Best Bits: At some point you realise that technically these rebels could be classified as the bad guys, but you don’t care. You’re on their side and if you could, you’d be throwing Molotovs and planning assassinations right there with them.
Exceptionally funny. That’s the only explanation The Croods needs. The cinema had as many adults as it had kids in watching it, and everyone was laughing, sometimes at the same jokes, sometimes at different ones. I cried from laughing so hard. It has a nice helping of sentiment and love, too.
Best Bits: [Spoiler] “Roll over, Douglas!”
A gritty action movie about a a detective trying to catch his nemesis, the criminal who badly injured him physically, and according to some of his colleagues mentally. A heist goes wrong the detective (played by James McAvoy, hello) is faced with his last change of catching the bad guy. But it proves to be quite a difficult task.
It’s a really good movie and doesn’t require much thinking.
Best Bits: I have to admit, it was just good to see James McAvoy again. It had been a while, for me at least, and he is a brilliant actor. Other than that, all of the action and the juicy twist that I refuse to spoil.
And just as though the Hollywood gods had heard about my James McAvoy shaped hole in my heart (too much?), along came Trance. It’s another action movie but it’s very different to the last one. It’s ten times better.
Our boy James plays an auctioneer who gets mixed up with a group of criminals who organised the theft of a very valuable painting… which vanishes. They get the help of a hypnotherapist to find out what happened to it, as the memory is buried inside James McAvoy’s head.
I really should look up the character’s name… but… JAMES MCAVOY!
The story is a little predictable Or, rather, you think that it is but then it goes all curly fry on you.
Best Bits: James McAvoy? OKAY, ok… uhm…
James McAvoy.
[Spoilers… ish] If someone had told me that Channing Tatum was only in it for about ten minutes I wouldn’t have bothered. It was a decent enough movie, albeit cheesy and predictable, but it wasn’t a waste of time. It was also the second time I got to see Adrianne Palicki this month (she was in Red Dawn, too) and I think she could be a new favourite. I’ll let you know.
Best Bits: [More actual spoilers] When Channing… I mean, Duke… dies, it’s in a big squishy battle. You don’t SEE him die but you know no one could survive that explosion. Yet, afterwards, when the survivors were leaving the area, I was sitting in my seat telling them that they were forgetting Ch-… Duke. “Don’t leave him! HE’S STILL ALIVE, DAMN IT!… Right?” Wrong. He died. I was sad. Once I accepted it.
I do not like Stephenie Meyer. I own The Host book but I haven’t read it. I’ve been told many, many times to read it because it is a good book, it’s so much better than Twilight, and I should just ignore the fact that it was written by Meyer. But I can’t. I tried. Twice. I just can’t. I’m sorry.
But when I saw the trailer for The Host a couple of months ago I got excited before I knew what it was. Here, at least, the trailer didn’t have the title screen when it showed in the cinema. It was just the black screen with the eclipse (*twitch*) which I hadn’t actually seen. I got excited for this movie I didn’t have a name for, and then I pieced it together. I knew what the basic idea of The Host was and this trailer definitely looked like it.
However… I actually liked the movie. I still have no desire to read the book but as a movie it was pretty good.
Best Bits: I loved the mix of old and new, especially with the CGI. Like seeing the shiny chrome vehicles in the dry desert, or when they removed the pretty, wispy alien parasite thing in the ramshackle operating room in the dusty cave they live in. I liked the contrast.
Yet another children’s story come to life on the big screen! I liked it, but not as much as some others. It was a little bit long. There was a point where I thought it was over, or almost over, but it kept going for another hour. I wasn’t exactly bored, but it was just a bit too long.
Best Bits: Bill Nighy as the one of the giants, and Ewan McGregor as a valiant knight.
The one about the guy who decides to chase down the person who has stolen his identity to try and make her stop and to get his life back.
One of those unfortunate movies where most of the funny bits were in the trailer. It was good fun, but not worth the cinema ticket… if you were going to pay for it, that is.
Best Bits: “What are you, a Kenyan?” Which was actually in the trailer.
I’ll admit it; I only wanted to see this because of Jason Momoa and his biceps (and the rest of him, but we’re spoiled for that with Game of Thrones and Conan, so I won’t complain too much). The story was pretty standard for an action movie. It wasn’t great but it wasn’t terrible, either. A hitman and a detective team up to bring down a mutual enemy, the detective constantly vowing to arrest the hitman when they’re done and in the end has a change of heart. What? Spoiler? Oh, like you didn’t see that one coming.
I had no idea what I was letting myself in for when I went to see Django with some friends. I thought it was going to be an action/Western type deal. And, it was… sort of. It turned out to be the funniest movie I have seen in a very long time. If you are very much against racism and the n-word you might get a little offended, but I doubt anyone could be. It was so well done, so ridiculously silly and funny that I cried with laughter. It’s a brilliant piece of cinema that everyone should see.
An amazing account of the search and elimination of Osama Bin Laden. It’s a long movie and at times it feels like it, too, but not so much that I wanted to get up and leave. It was that feeling you get when you’re in a day-long marathon of a history documentary of something you’re interested in, where you think ‘I wish it would get to the next bit’ but don’t want to rush it, either. I really enjoyed it but I didn’t realise how much until after it was over. It played on emotion very well and made you really think about what happened, and made you wonder what parts of the movie were just made up.
Romeo and Juliet in a zombie apocalypse. And I don’t mean that its just a star-crossed love story. I mean it is pretty much Romeo and Juliet. They’re called ‘R’ and Julie and there’s even a balcony scene!
I think I’ve seen one Die Hard movie and I thought it was decent. Usually it’s just not my kind of thing. I liked this one as much as the next non-fan would, but I did find the introduction of the guy’s son to be a bit awkward and much too sentimental. It ruined the Die Hard image a little, I think.
I had been impatiently waiting to see this for several months since my friends Stateside caught it last November. I was probably a little too excited and had very high expectations, and the good thing is that I wasn’t let down. Wreck-It Ralph was so adorable and so funny and sweet (literally) that it was worth the wait. In fact, I’m hoping to see it a second time before it leaves the cinema here. What’s not to love in a movie about arcade game characters and the adorable friendship between a big bad guy and a cute little girl called Vanellope von Schweets? [[Spoiler!] She’s my new favourite Disney Princess.]
Blech. Cringy and crappy the whole way through. It’s a book-to-movie from what is apparently a pretty big teen/urban fantasy series about witches who turn to the dark or the light side when they turn 16. There was something about a curse and there was a boy who fell in love with her and goshdarnit, loved her despite her being a witch. And I think in the end she went dark but was so good inside that it didn’t matter. Though, I may have just made that bit up. I can’t remember. The special effects were pretty good. Well, some of them. Some were just awkward. Definitely one to wait for it to air on TV so you can click on by.
I only went to see this because I didn’t want to waste a trip to town. It was dubbed ‘The Irish Hangover’ and it took me a bit to realise they meant the movie, The Hangover, and not just a general Monday morning in Ireland. 
Really enjoyable as long as you forbid your die-hard Tolkien friend from ranting about it. 
I wasn’t sure about seeing this one but there were so many posters for it everywhere I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. It turned out to be really good. The cinematography was awesome and the story, while being fairly predictable, was made so much better by the 1940’s setting. There aren’t enough neo-noir movies.
I saw this with a large group of friends and I believe one or two out of the twelve or so didn’t cry. Everyone must see this movie. It’s long as most musicals are, but I didn’t get bored at all. 
It was never going to win any awards but I thought Pitch Perfect was really fun. The music was great, the story was cheesy and predictable and so overdone you want to roll your eyes, but it was funny and charming.
I saw no marketing for Silver Linings Playbook before I noticed it in the listings. It’s basically a love story between two sociopaths. It’s hilarious and sweet at the same time, but the ending is as predictable as you probably guessed already.
The first disappointing movie I had seen so far. It wasn’t bad. It was just ‘ok’. On the big screen it looked amazing and it’s one of the only movies I would say to try and see in 3D if you can. However, the story was slow and pretty boring. I won’t be buying the DVD. I will say that everyone else that saw it loved it, though.
I was really excited for Lincoln. I was really disappointed. The acting was fantastic and the cinematography was amazing, but it dragged on for so long that I almost fell asleep a few times. For the most part it was so political that I felt like I was watching a documentary. I was so bored right up until the end.
