Archive

Tomb Raider (2013)

Posted 4:23pm Sunday 10th March 2013 by Baz Macdonald

It has been a long time since the heyday of the Tomb Raider franchise. The teenagers of the 90s enjoyed nothing more than playing with their heavily-breasted gal pal Lara Croft, but as the generation moved out of their mums’ basements and into the real world Lara was unfortunately left on the shelf Read more...

The Plague

Posted 4:23pm Sunday 10th March 2013 by Lucy Hunter

Rats are dying. Arriving home one night, Dr Bernard Rieux witnesses a sick rat rupturing and spurting blood from its mouth. Soon thousands are dead, burning in piles in the streets. Dr Rieux acknowledges the dead rats with intrigue. Then his door-porter dies of a peculiar fever, with a terrible Read more...

The Sweeney

Posted 5:18pm Sunday 3rd March 2013 by Kathleen Hanna

I had a real problem with this film, more so than any other crime film I’ve seen. The tagline for The Sweeney is “act like a criminal to catch a criminal.” It’s not the moral ambiguity of that I have a problem with. Hell, all movies should be morally ambiguous up to a point, especially those in Read more...

Beautiful Creatures

Posted 5:18pm Sunday 3rd March 2013 by S M Morgan

Beautiful Creatures is a supernatural fantasy, adapted from a book, which jumps right into things six months before the lead’s, Lena’s, birthday. On her birthday her powers will be claimed for either the “light” (good) or “dark” (evil) depending on the judgement of her “true nature,” which will Read more...

Safe Haven

Posted 5:18pm Sunday 3rd March 2013 by Rosie Howells

Straight off the bat, you should know I’m not built for “Soul-Searching-Romance.” I didn’t even enjoy The Holiday, which I understand essentially makes me The Tin Man, or Kim Jong Il, or something. So I was a little worried to hear that Safe Haven’s writer Nicholas Sparks is also responsible for Read more...

Alizarin Lizard

Posted 5:18pm Sunday 3rd March 2013 by Lisa Craw

If you live in Dunedin and you’ve never heard Alizarin Lizard, shame on you. Alizarin are one of the best current New Zealand bands, though are perhaps more occupied with crazed 42-date tours than they are with self-promotion. This, their second full-length album, is classic Lizard, filled with Read more...

Atoms For Peace - AMOK

Posted 5:18pm Sunday 3rd March 2013 by Basti Menkes

For those of you who are not already aware, I am an enormous Radiohead junkie. At any given moment you can probably catch me listening to them, forcing them onto the unfortunate folk around me, or possibly fantasising about one of the members. But as unhealthy as my addiction to Thom Yorke and his Read more...

Crysis 3

Posted 5:18pm Sunday 3rd March 2013 by Baz Macdonald

Last week’s announcement of the PlayStation 4 has the gaming community asking what the future for our medium holds. What stories are to be told? How they will look? How they will play? I ask, why wait for the future when it is happening now? The release of Crysis 3, the third installment in the Read more...

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo

Posted 5:18pm Sunday 3rd March 2013 by Dominic Tay

Every year, more than 30 million passengers fly into Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport. If you landed here at any time between 1991 and 2011, you’ll probably remember your journey out of the international terminal, past rows of luxury hotels, and into the heart of Mumbai. You Read more...

Anna Karenina

Posted 10:25pm Sunday 24th February 2013 by Sam McChesney

Patriarchy sucks mad d. From the creators of Pride and Prejudice (2005) comes one of the best-looking films since, well, Pride and Prejudice. Adapted from Tolstoy’s novel, which was recently named the greatest ever by Time magazine, Anna Karenina stars Keira Knightley and ... that guy from Read more...

A Good Day To Die Hard

Posted 10:23pm Sunday 24th February 2013 by Christine Edwards

So John McClane is back, and this time he’s wreaking havoc in a completely new place: Russia. As always, this Die Hard is about a badass cop who seems to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and, to make things right, goes in guns blazing and kicks the bad guy’s arse. This newest instalment, Read more...

Movie 43

Posted 10:23pm Sunday 24th February 2013 by Josie Cochrane

I had zero hopes for this movie before viewing, based largely on the film editor’s opening email to me: “Review Movie 43 – apparently one of the worst films of all time. Go on, I dare you.” A dare is a dare of course! Even with my low hopes, my first text when I left the movie was “Well mum, Read more...

Hitchcock

Posted 10:23pm Sunday 24th February 2013 by Finn Bulman

A movie about the making of a movie. Sure, it may have been done before, but Hitchcock pulls it off wonderfully. The story follows the life of famous film director Alfred Hitchcock, or “Hitch,” as he goes about creating one of the greatest horror films of all time, Psycho. He is met with Read more...

Aliens: Colonial Marines

Posted 10:23pm Sunday 24th February 2013 by Baz Macdonald

For those of you waiting for an exciting new game to play after the dry months since pre-Christmas releases, Aliens: Colonial Marines is not for you. The gaming industry has once again started the year in controversy. Last year we endured the disaster that was the ending of BioWare’s Read more...

The Daylight Gate by Jeanette Winterson

Posted 10:23pm Sunday 24th February 2013 by Thomas Thomson

Jeanette Winterson’s The Daylight Gate is a fictionalised re-telling of the events leading up to the Pendle Witch Trials of 1612. Set in Lancashire, a county then fabled for its wildness and strangeness, a stronghold of both Catholicism and witchcraft, the book describes an England feverish with Read more...

Trick Mammoth

Posted 10:02pm Sunday 24th February 2013 by Basti Menkes

Trick Mammoth is a Dunedin pop trio consisting of Adrian Ng (songwriting and vocals), Millie Lovelock (guitar and vocals), and Sam Valentine (drums). Enigmatic frontman Adrian describes their sound as “lo-fi music with a 90s guitar-pop edge.” He has been writing solo material under the Trick Read more...

Tomahawk - Oddfellows

Posted 10:02pm Sunday 24th February 2013 by Basti Menkes

Alternative metal supergroup Tomahawk are back with their first album in six years. Instead of picking up where the Native American-inspired Anonymous left off, the Mike Patton-led band of misfits have taken the Tomahawk sound back to its very roots, producing something truly unique. As the Read more...

My Bloody Valentine - m b v

Posted 10:02pm Sunday 24th February 2013 by Basti Menkes

How do you follow up a genre-defining masterpiece? My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields has spent the last two decades pondering that very question. Since its release in 1991, the band’s magnum opus Loveless has established itself as not only the definitive shoegaze album, but as one of the most Read more...

Men Like Us

Posted 5:59pm Sunday 7th October 2012 by Taryn Dryfhout

There is no way I can do this great film justice in a 300-word review. The opening sequence of Men Like Us illustrates the abundance of heterosexual images found in Western culture and sets the scene for nine men’s stories to be told, most of which begin with the way in which they were raised to Read more...

Hotel Transylvania

Posted 5:59pm Sunday 7th October 2012 by Lulu Sandston

Hotel Transylvania is based on the concept that humans are the perpetrators of scariness and monsters are the victims. The Hotel, built by Dracula (Adam Sandler), is a sanctuary for monsters, a place where they don’t have to hide in the shadows and can indulge all their eccentricities. For Read more...

Looper (2012)

Posted 5:59pm Sunday 7th October 2012 by Callum Fredric

In the year 2044, there are no flying cars. Admittedly, there are motorbikes that hover, but they’re totes unreliable. Most people drive the same cars as in 2012. And realistically, that’s what the future is going to be like. How much have cars actually changed since the 1950s? Likewise, antihero Read more...

Where Do We Go Now

Posted 5:59pm Sunday 7th October 2012 by Taryn Dryfhout

With the starring role played by the director herself, this movie was bound to be a little odd. Where Do We Go Now is set in a fictional village in Lebanon, where Christians and Muslims are living in harmony, oblivious to the war-torn nature of their relationship outside of their own community. This Read more...

THEA152 presents Voyager X: Baby Forest Animal Emporium

Posted 5:59pm Sunday 7th October 2012 by Bronwyn Wallace

Get a bunch of 30 overly dramatic, scheming theatre students together and tell them to create a show that uses a stage in new and innovative way. Ready, set, go – you’ve got Voyager. Tell them they can take any idea, any theme, any over-the-top, ridiculously outlandish, and extravagantly impossible Read more...

Sir Frank Brangwyn: Captain Winterbottom and the Billiard Room of Horton House

Posted 5:59pm Sunday 7th October 2012 by Taryn Dryfhout

When you enter the new exhibition at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, the enormous pool table that monopolises a large floor area in the centre of the room grabs your attention. The exhibition is “Sir Frank Brangwyn: Captain Winterbottom and the Billiard Room of Horton House”, and it is this billiard Read more...

A review, an outro; a comedy: Melville’s Bartleby

Posted 5:59pm Sunday 7th October 2012 by Josef Alton

It was on a fine day in New York City that the tall and lanky young man entered the chambers of an elderly Wall Street lawyer and undertook the job as a legal scrivener (legal copyist). The lawyer’s chambers were on the second story of a building that sat in the shade of its neighboring buildings. Read more...

Tex Mex Beef

Posted 5:59pm Sunday 7th October 2012 by Ines Shennan

Let me tell you about a dessert-related revelation I had some years ago. You take an overflowing handful of fresh strawberries, hull them, halve them, and place them into a bowl. Next, grab your nearby spice grinder, conveniently filled with black peppercorns. Crack the pepper over the strawberries. Read more...

Civilization V: Gods and Kings

Posted 5:59pm Sunday 7th October 2012 by Vimal Patel

2005’s Civilization IV was a wholesome game to give to your offspring. Combat, though it was very possible, was rarely an optimal method to achieve a successful, wide reaching collection of cities. IV was a game that promoted agriculture, enlightenment and diplomacy, a game that, after its patch Read more...

NY Excuse For A Good Time

Posted 5:59pm Sunday 7th October 2012 by Isaac McFarlane

New Year’s Eve is an important time for a lot of us – the final goodbye to a year of triumphs or failures, and the ushering in of new beginnings. Well, either that or a black hole in your memory from Dec 27 till Jan 2. Often the soundtrack to this haze of hedonism is provided by one of many Read more...

Mini Raspberry Citrus Cheesecakes

Posted 5:01pm Sunday 30th September 2012 by Ines Shennan

I’ve got something to share with you. I haven’t been entirely honest this year. From the recipes featured, my tastebuds would appear to lean towards the savoury; clearly I am a carb-consuming, meat-eating, spice-loving, caramelised-onion-obsessed lunatic. What have failed to grace these pages are Read more...

Soulwax

Posted 5:01pm Sunday 30th September 2012 by Isaac McFarlane

My good friend Tom Tremewan may have changed my life. Searching for a sense of sanity on a recent excursion to Captain Crunch’s World of Weird and Wacky, situated just 5 hours north of Dunedin, he turned to me and fumbled for the only topic that could save us from the Netherworld – music. “Have you Read more...

Otago Festival of the Arts

Posted 5:01pm Sunday 30th September 2012 by Bronwyn Wallace

I think we often forget, or rather overlook, the privilege of living in a culturally assimilated city like Dunedin. We always have a production on somewhere, be it professional or student-led, so if we feel like it we can take the evening off to enjoy a show. We are also lucky enough to have a Read more...

The Marriage Plot

Posted 5:01pm Sunday 30th September 2012 by Bradley Watson

After he focussed on mass suicide in The Virgin Suicides and then hermaphrodism in Middlesex, I was curious to see what Jeffrey Eugenides had in store for us with his latest novel, The Marriage Plot. Unlike his other novels, The Marriage Plot does not trade in shock value. Instead, the plot centres Read more...

Savages

Posted 5:01pm Sunday 30th September 2012 by Michaela Hunter

It pretty obvious from the get-go what kind of movie this is, because we’re told in direct narration by the sultry voice of main character O (short for Ophelia), played by Blake Lively. She explains that she’s a hot rich girl whose parents don’t love her, but who happened to win the affections of Read more...

Madagascar 3

Posted 5:01pm Sunday 30th September 2012 by Dan Benson-Guiu

I arrive at the theatre with great anticipation, unopened popcorn on my lap, just waiting for the ready-set-go. I haven’t seen a kids’ movie since way back, and nothing is better than trailers to get you in the mood. But we all remember the sheer awesomeness of Madagascar, right? Let’s move it! Read more...

Ruby Sparks

Posted 5:01pm Sunday 30th September 2012 by Georgia Rose

My expectations for this film were pretty non-existent, although I’d heard it was directed by the same duo that made Little Miss Sunshine, which gave me hope. I was also vaguely aware that it was about an author whose female character comes to life as his girlfriend, and anything he writes about her Read more...

Two Little Boys

Posted 5:01pm Sunday 30th September 2012 by Ashlea Muston

Two Little Boys is the story of Nige and Deano, two best mates from Invercargill. Nige (Bret McKenzie) finds himself in way over his head when he runs over a Norwegian backpacker. He confides in his friend Deano (Hamish Blake), despite their recent disagreement over a toasted sandwich. However, in Read more...

Smoky Repose

Posted 5:01pm Sunday 30th September 2012 by Beaurey Chan

A young woman poses in profile against an indistinct backdrop, a cigarette propped just so in her mouth as she gazes coolly into the unknown distance. Another girl’s hair is drawn tightly back as she clenches her face into an expression of what could be pain or pleasure. The cigarette makes Read more...

Mark of the Ninja - REVIEW

Posted 5:01pm Sunday 30th September 2012 by Toby Hills

"Other” ninja games, and developer Klei Entertainment refuses to name names, are very un-ninja-like. Why spend all that time shrouding yourself in stifling, shadowy rags if you are going to blunder into the middle of a swathe of foes and paint the walls in their bright red blood just to show, Read more...

Chicken Caesar Salad

Posted 4:25pm Sunday 23rd September 2012 by Maeve Jones

Caesar salad often emphasises the heavy, creamy dressing, which is more often than not over-processed and ruins a perfectly good salad. For me it is all about the croutons. Croutons are a delicious and convenient way to use bread that is past its prime. Most cultures in the world have some creative Read more...

Why Dubstep Isn’t Shit

Posted 4:25pm Sunday 23rd September 2012 by Isaac McFarlane

Dubstep gets a bad rap, and to be fair, it does deserve a lot of it. But dubstep is not total shit. There is some wonderfully interesting, energetic, face-meltingly beautiful dubstep created out there in a truly global scene, facilitated by the same thing that made it so hated – the Internet. Yes, I Read more...

American Angels

Posted 4:25pm Sunday 23rd September 2012 by Bronwyn Wallace

What a week! Art exhibitions in the Link and free coffee out on the lawn – aah, what a cultured University we all attend. In sticking with the 24-hour time frame, it’s hardly a panic to find something to write about for this issue, as dear old Allen hall will always have something for us there. Read more...

Monsieur Linh and his Child

Posted 4:25pm Sunday 23rd September 2012 by Lucy Hunter

Monsieur Linh is the only person who knows his name, because everybody who used to know it is dead. He arrives by ship from an unnamed country in Indo-China to France, clutching a small suitcase of meagre possessions, and his new-born granddaughter, Sang diû, who weighs less than the suitcase. His Read more...

Your Sister’s Sister

Posted 4:25pm Sunday 23rd September 2012 by Taryn Dryfhout

I’m not sure if Your Sister’s Sister is a romantic comedy or not, but whatever its classification, it’s a great watch. The film opens with Jack (Mark Duplass) struggling to recover from the loss of his brother, and making an ass of himself at a subsequent memorial party. His best friend Iris Read more...

Hysteria

Posted 4:25pm Sunday 23rd September 2012 by Ashlea Muston

Hysteria, set in London in the 1880s, follows the story of the ever-spirited young Doctor Mortimer Granville prior to his discovery of the vibrator and its medical benefits. Mortimer (Hugh Dancy) continually seeks betterment in the medical profession, and is enamoured with the breakthrough science Read more...

On The Road

Posted 4:25pm Sunday 23rd September 2012 by Dan Benson-Guiu

This adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s novel immerses us in a time period that is short but alive with change. It is the postwar era, and we are introduced to a small group of budding writers who are part of a culture which, as a whole, seems lively and creative. Sal Paradise (Sam Riley) is not feeling Read more...

Just keep swimming, just keep swimming

Posted 4:25pm Sunday 23rd September 2012 by Beaurey Chan

I don’t know about you, but there’s something about tentacles that freak me out. Sea creatures in general are scary: sharks, jellyfish (Finding Nemo has a lot to answer for), flesh-eating piranhas, and so on – the whole lot are evil harbingers of doom as far as I’m concerned. But while Deep Sea Read more...

FTL - Review

Posted 4:25pm Sunday 23rd September 2012 by Toby Hills

In a quantum instant, a single broadside torpedo slips through the rickety space-cruiser’s momentarily downed shields, and ignites the oxygen recirculator. Immediately, the grizzled captain shuts down the blast doors and opens the ship’s port and stern airlocks, evacuating the gaseous contents from Read more...

Moonrise Kingdom

Posted 4:57pm Sunday 16th September 2012 by Taryn Dryfhout

Set in the 1960s, Moonrise Kingdom is about a couple of New England kids who cross paths at a summer camp and fall head-over-heels in love. Suzy comes from an upper-class family of lawyers, while Sam is an orphan who is constantly in and out of foster homes. Before leaving the camp, they make a pact Read more...

The Expendables 2

Posted 4:57pm Sunday 16th September 2012 by Critic

The Expendables 2 revolves around a group of mercenaries, the Expendables, who are enlisted by a Mr Church to retrieve a lost package from a downed plane. What seems like an easy job takes a wrong turn when one of their crew is murdered during the operation. Determined to seek revenge, the Read more...

Wunderkinder

Posted 4:57pm Sunday 16th September 2012 by Lulu Sandston

Wunderkinder, set in the Ukraine in 1941, follows three young musical Wunderkinder, or child prodigies, who are bound by their love of music. Violinist Hanna Reich (Bridgette Grothum) is German, while pianist Larissa Brodsky (Imogen Burrell) and violinist Abrascha Kaplan (Elin Kolev) are Jewish. Read more...