Michael Sheen Page 3

Anchored by the almost ridiculously engaging Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence, this sci-fi movie travels through drama, comedy, romance and action as it tells a deep-space story with essentially just three characters. Directed by Morten Tyldum (The Imitation Game), the film looks sleek and cool, but it's the charismatic duo at the centre that holds the attention.

The spacecraft Avalon is on a 120-year journey from Earth to a distant homestead planet, where its 5,000 hibernating passengers will wake up to start a new life. But only 30 years into the trip, one pod opens by mistake. And James (Pratt) realises that he's come out of suspended animation 90 years too soon. His only company is a robotic barman (Sheen), so in a moment of weakness he wakes up another passenger, Aurora (Lawrence). As they begin to settle in for their long, lonely life together, the ship begins misbehaving, waking up a crew member (Laurence Fishburne) who works with James and Aurora to figure out why all of this is happening. And they'll need to work quickly if they hope to save the lives of the sleeping passengers.

Basically, the film is like a mash-up of Titanic and Gravity. The Avalon is a super-whizzy cruiseliner, and Tyldum finds all kinds of visually stunning settings in its various areas, from the vast shopping mall at the centre to a windowed swimming pool and a few gasp-inducing spacewalks. There's also a riff on the disparity between poor passengers like mechanic James in steerage and the wealthy ones like writer Aurora. Plus a hint of an idea in the corporate conglomerate that's making a fortune from this ambitious project. But these deeper themes remain well under the surface, as the attention focuses squarely on the journey James and Aurora are taking. This may leave the movie feeling rather thin and superficial, but it's also deeply involving.

Continue reading: Passengers Review

We generally expect more wacky humour from Fey and Rudd than this comedy, which is packed with perhaps too-smart dialog and a lot of warm sentiment. It's an odd mix, looking for jokes in gender roles and higher education, while also finding dramatic and romantic moments along the way. But in the end, the engaging actors make it worth a look.

Fey plays Portia, an admissions officer at the prestigious Princeton University, who's in competition with her office rival (Reuben) for a big promotion as their boss (Shawn) gets ready to retire. Unhelpfully, Portia's long-term boyfriend (Sheen) chooses this moment to leave her. Diving into her job, she visits a progressive high school where the director John (Rudd) is trying a bit too hard to get her to consider unconventionally gifted student Jeremiah (Wolff) for admission to Princeton. Then John tells Portia that he thinks Jeremiah is the son she gave up for adoption 18 years earlier. Meanwhile, Portia's aggressive feminist mother (the superb Tomlin) brings up even more past issues she's never quite dealt with.

The way the screenplay piles all of this on Portia at the same time is more than a little contrived, but Fey juggles it effortlessly, throwing hilariously intelligent one-liners around even in the more intensely serious scenes. Opposite her, Rudd is more understated than usual, and also creates a strongly defined character as a rootless wanderer who just wants to help make the world a better place, but needs to pay more attention to his adopted Ugandan son (Spears). Yes, screenwriter Kroner throws in every variety of parent-child issues too.

Continue reading: Admission Review

With a flurry of bonkers action and cross-species bonding, The Twilight Saga surges to a howling conclusion that has more attitude in it than all four previous films put together. There's no time for moping now, as things build to a crescendo of girly emotion, portentous pronouncements and more decapitations than you can count. Even the plot itself gets rather playful.

We pick things up immediately after Part 1 ended: Bella (Kristen) is getting used to her heightened vampire senses and intense lovemaking prowess with her new husband Edward (Pattinson), while their daughter Renesmee (Foy) ages alarmingly from infancy to about 10 in just a few weeks, overseen by soulmate-protector wolf-boy Jacob (Lautner). But the ruling Volturi boss (Sheen) has been misinformed that Renesmee is a feared immortal child, rather than a rare but apparently harmless human-vampire hybrid. As the Volturi army heads to Seattle to obliterate Edward and the Cullen clan (including Facinelli, Reaser, Greene and Lutz), the Cullens draft in an army of their own from around the world.

Essentially the film is a long build-up to a big showdown, as everyone jostles for position. This makes the film feel much pacier than the earlier chapters, as we jump from scene to scene while the Cullens prepare for the onslaught. Many scenes involve the introduction of the vampires who support their effort, and like X-men many have some sort of supernatural ability that can aid the fight. Thankfully, director Condon refuses to take this nonsense seriously, and has quite a lot of fun with the various story elements. He also gleefully ramps up the tetchy interaction between Jacob and Edward, and even makes a joke about the fact that actors playing vampires must wear red contact lenses.

Continue reading: The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2 Review

There isn't a narrative, although the film is arranged to recount an epic journey using voice-over readings from authors like Homer, Sophocles, Milton, Shakespeare, Beckett and Nietzsche. There are also title-card quotes, songs and music, including some pieces performed in old film clips (such as Leontyne Price singing Motherless Child). Meanwhile we see a collage of old film clips and crisp new footage shot in snowy Alaska featuring silent men in yellow, blue and black parkas that obscure their faces.

Continue reading: The Nine Muses Review

After their men sneak off in the night to join the resistance, farm wives Sarah (Riseborough) and Maggie (Morgan) are left to do the work themselves. Soon a group of German soldiers arrives, led by Captain Albrecht (Wlaschiha), who takes an odd approach to his role as an occupying force. He decides to hide from the Gestapo in this valley, hopefully riding out the war while keeping his young officers (Ianevski, Doestch and Taubman) from battle. He also develops an uneasy friendship with Sarah.

Continue reading: Resistance Review

Blocked writer Gil (Wilson) is visiting Paris with his wife Inez (McAdams) and her high-achieving parents (Fuller and Kennedy). When they run into Inez's know-it-all ex (Sheen), Gil starts having second thoughts about everything. He also begins to wish he'd lived in Paris in the artistic heyday of the 1920s, and is stunned one night to find himself in some kind of magical time-warp, rubbing shoulders with F Scott Fitzgerald (Hiddleston), Gertrude Stein (Bates) and Ernest Hemmingway (Stoll). He also begins to fall for Adriana (Cotillard), a muse for Picasso and Modigliani.

Continue reading: Midnight In Paris Review

Just as Bella (Stewart) turns 18 and begins her senior year in high school, her beloved Edward (Pattinson) decides he has to leave town for her safety. In a deep funk, she eventually turns to neighbour Jacob (Lautner) for company, but their friendship takes a twist when he starts getting hunky and tetchy and hanging out with gang-leader Sam (Spencer). But it's not steroids; the gang members are actually werewolves, locked in mortal combat with vampires. And she needs (and wants) to keep both Edward and Jacob in her life.

Continue reading: The Twilight Saga: New Moon Review

The Deal is a prequel to The Queen only in the sense that it involves historical details that occurred before those in The Queen. It also involves the same writer, director, and star Michael Sheen, who also plays Tony Blair in this film. The movie involves succession to the position of British Prime Minister in the late 1990s, which found young guns Tony Blair and Gordon Brown both riding high in the liberal Labour Party, rapidly becoming the most popular party in the country and one which delivered a crushing defeat to the Conservative Party in the 1997 elections.

Continue reading: The Deal (2003) Review

It begins with the landslide election of Prime Minister Tony Blair (a shockingly good Michael Sheen) and moves to the car accident that led to Di's death. Frears then meditates on the decisions and the struggle between modernism and tradition that Queen Elizabeth (Helen Mirren) and her family must consider in the wake of not just a familial, but worldwide, day of mourning. For those who don't remember, after the death, there was major pressure for the family to mourn in public, to show their grief and prove that even though Di wasn't part of the family anymore, they were still in a state of solemnity.

Continue reading: The Queen Review

Harry Faversham (Heath Ledger), a soldier with the British Army, is unwilling to travel into the Sudan with the rest of his regimen to protect British interests there. So, he resigns his commission. In response, Harry's fellow soldiers issue him three feathers symbolizing his cowardice for leaving. Looking for support, he turns to his father (a former military officer), who disowns him. As well, his fiancé Ethne (Kate Hudson), who provides a fourth feather and calls off their engagement. Unable to cope with the harsh reactions his decision prompts, Harry hastily departs for the Sudan to find a way to help his friends and redeem his honor.

Continue reading: The Four Feathers Review

For almost five years now, Hollywood studios have beentrying to duplicate the success of "Gladiator"by making the same big-budget historical battle epic over ("TheLast Samurai") and over ("Troy")and over ("KingArthur") and over ("Alexander").

Each movie has re-imagined history from a modern, let's-keep-an-open-mindperspective and hewed to a shopworn formula in which the hero rallies hismen against great odds and for a greater good. He invariably leads theminto the same blood-and-mud war scenes, which are always shot in the samestaccato slow-motion that characterizes the chaos of combat but forgetsthe audience needs to be kept abreast of who is winning. The hero alsoalways finds time to romance a beautiful woman from another culture.

Aside from having different casts, the only significantvariations between these films seem to be 1) whether the hero was of noblebirth or came up from nothing to become a great leader, and 2) whetherthe battlefields are green and forested or brown and sandy. One thing mostof them definitely have in common is that they've bombed at the box office.

Continue reading: Kingdom Of Heaven Review

"Underworld" might have been one bad-ass B-movie, if only its plot about a war between vampires and werewolves had been seen by co-writer/director Len Wiseman as anything more than a token gimmick on which to hang "Matrix"-mimicking action and antiquated genre clichés.

Thick with mold-breaking potential that goes completely unexplored, the picture is populated by cardboard cutouts of aristocratic, clownishly Goth-fashioned bloodsuckers and sunken-eyed, greasy-haired, heavy-metal headbanger-styled lycans (a fancy word for werewolves). The two races exhaust every trite and tired facet of their respective horror folklore in a story that has obviously, and rather clumsily, had elements edited out -- including a romance between warrior vampiress Selene (Kate Beckinsale) and Michael (Scott Speedman), a human with werewolf ancestry.

When Kraven (ravenous scenery glutton Shane Brolly) -- the conniving, devious, temporary leader of the vampires while their sovereign is entombed in hibernation -- orders the human killed because his DNA could change the course of the centuries-old war, Selene risks her life to save the guy for reasons that aren't entirely clear in this final version of the film.

Continue reading: Underworld Review

All sweeping desert vistas and melodramatic 19th Century British imperial clichés (updated with politically correct tisk-tisking, of course), Shekhar Kapur's "The Four Feathers" is a hollow-hearted epic for the sake of an epic.

The tedious seventh film adaptation of A.E.W. Manson's turn-of-the-Century flag-waving war novel about the heroic redemption of craven English army officer, the film stars Heath Ledger ("A Knight's Tale," "Monster's Ball") as Harry Feversham, a highly respected young soldier who resigns his commission -- for reasons related to panic, not principle -- just as his regiment is being shipped off for the first time to battle Sudanese rebels.

"I never wanted to join the army," he whines. "I did it for my father. I thought I'd serve out my commission a year or two."

Continue reading: The Four Feathers Review