Archive

Mrs Carey’s Concert

Posted 4:44am Thursday 4th August 2011 by Feby Idrus

Directed by: Bob Connelly and Sophie Raymond, (3.5/5). Mrs Carey’s Concert is one of those quintessential performing-arts films in which, through the power of music/dance/theatre/etc., a bad boy/girl finds out what makes him/her special and rises to the occasion and it’s all, like, Read more...

Copacabana

Posted 4:41am Thursday 4th August 2011 by Loulou Callister-Baker

Directed by Marc Fitoussi, (4/5). Copacabana is a French comedy about Babou (Isabelle Huppert), a mother who is faced with a relationship break up between her and her daughter, Esmeralda (Lolita Chammah). Esmeralda is very unlike the free spirited gypsy of Victor Hugo’s novel. She is Read more...

Cars 2

Posted 4:40am Thursday 4th August 2011 by Zane Pocock

Directed by: John Lasseter, (3/5). Entering Rialto having watched the trailer for Cars 2, I just wanted to see the familiar characters of Cars back in the American west for a wee trip of nostalgia. But the trailer had scared me. After all, how many times have blockbusters turned out to be far Read more...

Film Festival

Posted 4:38am Thursday 4th August 2011 by Sarah Baillie

The New Zealand International Film Festival kicks off this Thursday and runs until the August 21. Critic’s film editor Sarah Baillie gives a run down of our top ten picks for the festival. Make sure to head along, it only comes once a year! Project Nim   Perhaps it is just because I Read more...

Our Tragic Universe

Posted 4:08am Monday 1st August 2011 by Liam Dakin

Author: Scarlett Thomas, Publisher: Canongate, (4/5). Inside this teen-fantasy-adventure-esque cover (complete with cool black edged pages) is a story about Meg, a freelance author struggling to survive by teaching writing classes and reviewing popular science books. All the while she is Read more...

THE GRADUATE EXHIBITION

Posted 4:04am Monday 1st August 2011 by Hana Aoake

Oliver van der Lugt, Claire Mahoney & Tom Garden. Blue Oyster Art Project Space Traversing the alleyway entrance to the Blue Oyster art project space, one encounters the work of three very different artists, all of whom investigate a type of environment. The thread binding the show together is Read more...

Dunedin Playback Theatre Company: Not a Review, Just Some Thoughts.

Posted 4:13am Thursday 28th July 2011 by Jen Aitken

Members: Sandra Turner, Miriam Noonan, Chrissy Hollamby, Karen Jacquard, Glenda Wallace and Penny Warren. Playback theatre is spontaneous theatre that aims to build community through telling personal stories and exposing shared experiences. This is a bold aim, and in today’s busy world Read more...

CAB SAV: A Savvy Cabaret

Posted 4:11am Thursday 28th July 2011 by Miriam Noonan

CAB SAV was devised and created in collaboration with its cast, and what a delightfully ‘savvy’ cast they were! A team of very passionate performers and producer and director Karin Reid created a wonderfully entertaining night that blended satire, music, dance, comedy and puppetry, drawing Read more...

Arctic Monkeys: Suck It and See

Posted 3:39am Thursday 28th July 2011 by Richard Ley-Hamilton

If only given a few listens, Suck It and See could be easily misconstrued as an album swept along the tide of 60’s revivalism. Furthermore, those who have paid little attention to the Arctic Monkeys’ continual musical evolution might find the lack of a punk ethos on this album weighty Read more...

An Open Letter of Support

Posted 3:22am Thursday 28th July 2011 by David Large

Former Critic Editor & Radio One News Chap David Large Puts His Views In Writing As the sting goes, I've fucked off to Sydney but I still listen to Radio One, 91FM. It's the station that offered an alternative soundtrack during my years at the University of Otago. It’s the station that Read more...

LA Noire

Posted 3:19am Thursday 28th July 2011 by Toby Hills

Platforms: Xbox 360, Playstation 3, (4.5/5). My mum got into LA Noire. She isn't one of those “closet casuals” either. Never has she grasped a controller in concord so it is telling that the relaxed, assured style of Team Bondi’s 1940s detective game compelled even her to try Read more...

Cafe Review - Doc’s Coffee House

Posted 3:16am Thursday 28th July 2011 by Pippa Schaffler

Albany Street, to the left of the Clubs and Socs Building, (3/5). Prices: Flat White: $3.50, Long Black: $3, Mocha: $3.50 Why I came here: My flatmate and I were rushing to get out of the torrential rain and found ourselves right outside Doc’s. Atmosphere: Cute and Read more...

American Pie

Posted 3:12am Thursday 28th July 2011 by Niki Lomax

Considering pumpkin is so bloody cheap at the moment, it seems sensible to incorporate this orange wonder food into as many meals as possible. Starting, logically, with dessert. I’ve become quite obsessed with the idea of pumpkin pie recently, which I attribute to a combination of the fact that I Read more...

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part II

Posted 3:06am Thursday 28th July 2011 by Niki Lomax

Directed by: David Yates, (4.5/5). [Spoiler alert: to anyone who has been living under a rock for the past decade and is yet to read a Potter book, be warned; the following review contains plot details.]   It’s fourteen years since the first Harry Potter book was published, Read more...

The Big Picture

Posted 3:05am Thursday 28th July 2011 by Tom Ainge-Roy

Directed by: Eric Lartigau, (3.5/5). The Big Picture centres on Paul Exben (Romain Duris), a successful lawyer with his own firm in Paris, a beautiful wife and two handsome children. From an outsider’s perspective the marriage appears to be going well, but tension is felt from the Read more...

The Conspirator

Posted 3:04am Thursday 28th July 2011 by Lauren Enright

Directed by: Robert Redford, (3/5). The Conspirator is a fantastic historical legal drama. Based on the 1915 drama The Birth of a Nation by D.W. Griffith, it tells the story of Mary Surratt, the only female co-conspirator charged with the Abraham Lincoln assassination and the first woman to be Read more...

The Reluctant Infidel

Posted 3:03am Thursday 28th July 2011 by Dan Benson-Guiu

Directed by: Josh Appignanesi, (3.5/5). Mahmoud (Omid Djalili) could be your average Brit. He’s an entrepreneur who hates cab drivers, walks around in soccer shirts, drinks beer and watches 70s music videos on MTV. He doesn’t need to be told that he isn’t a perfect Muslim by Read more...

The Forgiveness of Blood

Posted 2:58am Thursday 28th July 2011 by Loulou Callister-Baker

The New Zealand International Film Festival opens this Thursday, July 28, and is packed to the brim with exciting films from a range of genres. Critic was lucky enough to get a sneak peek at some of the films. Dir: Joshua Marston   Set in a small rural town in Albania, this film Read more...

POM Wonderful presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold

Posted 2:58am Thursday 28th July 2011 by Lauren Hayes

The New Zealand International Film Festival opens this Thursday, July 28, and is packed to the brim with exciting films from a range of genres. Critic was lucky enough to get a sneak peek at some of the films. Dir: Morgan Spurlock   Get excited. POM Wonderful presents: The Greatest Read more...

Medianeras

Posted 2:57am Thursday 28th July 2011 by Zane Pocock

The New Zealand International Film Festival opens this Thursday, July 28, and is packed to the brim with exciting films from a range of genres. Critic was lucky enough to get a sneak peek at some of the films. Dir: Gustavo Taretto   Medianeras, set in Buenos Aires, is an incredibly Read more...

Heartbeats

Posted 2:56am Thursday 28th July 2011 by Sarah Baillie

The New Zealand International Film Festival opens this Thursday, July 28, and is packed to the brim with exciting films from a range of genres. Critic was lucky enough to get a sneak peek at some of the films. Visit www.nzff.co.nz/Dunedin to check out the full programme, or grab one of the booklets Read more...

Troll 2

Posted 2:51am Thursday 28th July 2011 by Ben Blakely

Written/Directed by: Drake Floyd. Starring: Michael Stephenson, George Hardy, Margo Prey, Connie McFarland, Robert Ormsby. The only thing that links this film to the original Troll is the title; there are in fact no trolls in this film. Instead, goblins rein supreme in this truly awful, Read more...

Reuben Paterson

Posted 11:32pm Monday 25th July 2011 by Kari Schmidt

Reuben Paterson's digital animation has a fundamental, primal attraction. It consists of a large silver, glittery screen on which a kaleidoscopic projection is playing. Like magpies, humans like glittery, shiny things (a fact Paterson has manipulated before, for example in his When the Sun Rises and Read more...

The Tutor

Posted 5:22am Monday 25th July 2011 by Ben Blakely

Fortune Theatre Mainstage. Written by Dave Armstrong. Directed by Patrick Davies Starring: Phil Vaughan, Jon Pheloung, Jake Metzger, (3.5/5), There was a warning attached to The Tutor telling us that it contained coarse language. In this respect it certainly delivered. The play opened Read more...

Frequency!

Posted 5:20am Monday 25th July 2011 by Jen Aitken

Devised and directed by Miriam Noonan. Devised and performed by Bronwyn Wallace, Feather Emma Shaw, James Caley, Luke Agnew, Nylla Tamati and Piupiu-Maya Turei, (3.5/5). Frequency! was pretty darn hilarious. With the loudest and raspiest laugh in the theatre, I was afraid I would put the Read more...

Full Moon Fiasco (Wel), Thought Creature (Wel), Killmore Girls (Dud) and Axe Handal (Dud)

Posted 4:49am Monday 25th July 2011 by Spencer Hall

Matinee Show at Re:Fuel, Sunday July 10. This was the first matinee show I've been to at Re:Fuel since the all-age metal gigs they used to have back when I was in highschool. Kicking things off was Axe Handal, drummer Rory MacMurdo (TFF, Brüer Grinder) with his laptop bandmate. Read more...

An Open Letter of support

Posted 4:47am Monday 25th July 2011 by Dudley Benson

from New Zealand musician Dudley Benson regarding the future of Radio One 91FM As an independent artist originally from Christchurch, having been based in Auckland for the last five years and now living in Dunedin, I have spent a significant amount of time and energy working with and listening Read more...

Infamous 2

Posted 4:45am Monday 25th July 2011 by Hamish Gavin

Platforms: Playstation 3, (4/5). Infamous 2 is a slick sequel to the 2009 open world action adventure game. It manages to stay true to the elements that made the original a success, while adding enough new features and contains a well enough scripted plot to keep things interesting. While the Read more...

Hungry and Frozen

Posted 4:42am Monday 25th July 2011 by Laura Vincent

This week Critic is lucky enough to have a guest contributor - Laura Vincent of popular food blog hungryandfrozen.blogspot.com. Laura started food blogging when she was a broke student, so she understands the pain of loving butter but having no money. Check out her blog for other delicious recipes Read more...

The Company Men

Posted 4:39am Monday 25th July 2011 by Tom Ainge-Roy

Directed by: John Wells, (3.5/5). The Company Men focuses on three men who lose their jobs at the beginning of the recession due to corporate downsizing. Each man considered himself irreplaceable, and after giving their life to their work they find themselves stranded, struggling to find Read more...

Beyond

Posted 4:38am Monday 25th July 2011 by Eve Duckworth

Directed by: Pernilla August. (4/5). Previously seen in the Millennium trilogy, Noomi Rapace lives up to her newfound fame in Beyond, a domestic drama centred on alcohol abuse and misguided love. Set in Sweden, Rapace plays Leena, a wife and mother who has spent years shaking the painful Read more...

Kung Fu Panda 2

Posted 4:37am Monday 25th July 2011 by Loulou Callister-Baker

Directed by: Jennifer Yuh, (3.5/5). Kung Fu Panda 2 is a visual power-punch despite its sloppy narrative footwork. It opens with a marvelous animation technique influenced by Chinese paper cutting, the first of three different types of animation used in this visually expert and creative Read more...

Potiche

Posted 4:35am Monday 25th July 2011 by Michaela Hunter

Directed by: François Ozon, (4/5) Based on a play from the Seventies, Potiche (“Trophy Wife”) is set in 1977 in provincial France and revolves around the struggles of Suzanne Pujol (Catherine Deneuve) and the dysfunctional relationships of the Pujol family. When her husband Robert Read more...

Screwjack

Posted 3:53am Monday 25th July 2011 by Sarah Maessen

Author: Hunter S Thompson, (4/5), Screwjack is a small collection of three short stories. Initially only 300 collector’s copies and 26 leather bound books were published, and one could expect to pay upwards of a thousand dollars for a copy.   The book is introduced by Read more...

Ralph Hotere: Zero to Inifinity

Posted 3:51am Monday 25th July 2011 by Hana Aoake

The Hocken Gallery, Cnr Anzac Ave & Parry Street Ralph Hotere is New Zealand’s most revered living painter. Zero to Infinity consists of fifty works and incorporates a broad range of Hotere’s paintings from his celebrated milestones, to his political works to his lesser-known Read more...

My Manifesto

Posted 12:05am Tuesday 12th July 2011 by Jen Aitken

On the State of Theatre at the Start of Semester Two, 2011. Having recently returned from Melbourne, I am distressed. I saw a play, Sarajevo Suite. It was amazing, mind-altering in its simplicity and beauty. It was on at a theatre called La Mama which is an old house converted into a theatre, Read more...

THE TUTOR

Posted 12:03am Tuesday 12th July 2011 by Jen Aitken

Written by Dave Armstrong, directed by Patrick Davies Fortune Theatre. The Tutor comes to us from the nationally acclaimed and award winning writer of Bro’ Town and Seven Periods With Mr Gormsby (which if you haven’t seen you should), Dave Armstrong. The Tutor depicts the Read more...

Lady Gaga. Born This Way.

Posted 11:25pm Monday 11th July 2011 by Amelia Pond

What I want from a Lady Gaga album is something that you can learn all the words to and then sing as you bounce violently around your living room after one too many glasses of goon. (I was actually busted doing this very thing by an unexpected visitor quite recently.) ‘The Fame’ delivered that, but Read more...

An open letter of support

Posted 11:20pm Monday 11th July 2011 by James Milne

from James Milne aka Lawrence Arabia regarding the future of Dunedin's Radio One. "To whom it may concern, This is a note in support of the ongoing work of Radio One within the context of the OUSA and the Dunedin community as a whole. Over the past eight years as a professional Read more...

Trenched

Posted 11:17pm Monday 11th July 2011 by Toby Hills

Platform: XBLA, (4.5/5). Because WWI trenches, as games teach us over and over again, were loads of fun. And kind of had a steam-punk vibe to them, which is always cool. The style of Double Fine's Trenched, pushes those ideals as far as they can reasonably be expected to go in an alternate Read more...

Duke Nukem Forever

Posted 11:15pm Monday 11th July 2011 by Hamish Gavin

Platforms: PC, Mac, Xbox 360, Playstation 3, (2.5/5). It’s finally out. Duke Nukem Forever. A game we’ve all been waiting fifteen long years for, ever since we first cast our eyes on the almighty landmark of first person shooter history, the granddaddy of interactive violent video Read more...

Falafelicious Falafel

Posted 11:13pm Monday 11th July 2011 by Sharin Shaik

First week back and no doubt everyone is already missing mum’s well-stocked fridge. No need to settle for Indomee or baked beans just yet. This week Critic brings you a simple and delicious recipe for homemade falafel. This recipe is so easy, not to mention more filling and healthier than instant Read more...

Cafe Review - St Daves Cafe

Posted 11:08pm Monday 11th July 2011 by Pippa Schaffler

Inside St Daves on the corner, (2/5). Prices: Flat White: $3.70, Long Black: $3, Mocha: $4.20   Why I came here: I needed a study break during exams and this was the closest place open on the weekend.    Atmosphere: Busy and tired.   Service: Not Read more...

My Afternoons With Margueritte

Posted 11:06pm Monday 11th July 2011 by Hamish Gavin

Director: Jean Becker, (4/5). The title of this quaint and charming French film translates into English as ‘Dunderhead’. I’m not sure which title I prefer, but I think the English one captures the mood of the film slightly more. Though to assume that the only thing in Read more...

Bridesmaids

Posted 11:04pm Monday 11th July 2011 by Nicole Muriel

Director: Paul Feig, (4/5). You’ve probably already heard about Bridesmaids: it’s been touted as ‘The Hangover for women’ and audiences, mainly female, are flocking to it in hordes. So is Bridesmaids as funny as the publicity implies? The short answer is yes. But Read more...

Bad Teacher

Posted 11:02pm Monday 11th July 2011 by Madeleine Wright

Director: Jake Kasdan, (2/5). You can be certain that with Bad Teacher – keeping in mind the title, the seductive advertising campaign and of course, Cameron Diaz – what you see is definitely what you get. Diaz stars in her stereotypical role as Elizabeth, a school teacher with a Read more...

Transformers: Dark Side of the Moon

Posted 11:01pm Monday 11th July 2011 by Gareth Barton

Directed by: Michael Bay, (4/5). The thing I love about the Transformers movies and the original, awesome, cartoons is that despite being a race of super advanced robots they always end up fighting with swords. First things first, the biggest change in this latest of money-makers is that Megan Read more...

Blacula (1972)

Posted 10:56pm Monday 11th July 2011 by Ben Blakely

Directed by: William Crain. Staring: William Marshall, Vonetta McGee, Thalmus Resulala. Long before Edward, Bill and Eric graced us with their undead presence there was Blacula. African Prince Mamuwalde (Marshall) meets with the one and only Count Dracula to arrange the end of slave trade. Read more...

One Day

Posted 4:31am Monday 11th July 2011 by Niki Lomax

Author: David Nicholls, (4.5/5) One Day is one of the best books I’ve read in a while. It begins in Edinburgh in 1988 with two recently graduated uni students having what they assume will be a one-night stand. Immediately I felt like the target demographic. This one night fling turns Read more...

GLUE GALLERY: 26 STAFFORD STREET

Posted 4:27am Monday 11th July 2011 by Hana Aoake

Sometimes even walking into a contemporary art space can be a daunting experience. Contemporary art venues have a tendency to feel inaccessible. However, Glue Gallery and Shop, a new space located on Stafford Street, is designed specifically to address this issue. Having a strong community Read more...