Reviews

The first section holds promise of a tense thriller as Ryan Gosling gets addicted to robbing banks and using his motorbike riding skills to escape at high speed until...... The second section focuses on Bradley Cooper's cop, hailed as a hero but who finds it a mixed blessing carrying both danger but also opportunities worth exploiting. Once the headline appears on screen 'Fifteen Years later', we are in the third section and it's here that the film completely falls apart. The story becomes melodramatic and utterly predictable; the coincidences and plot contrivances are just ridiculous.To make matters worse we are served up a load of cod-psychology about fathers and sons. If only the director had stuck to making a solid thriller without all the pretentious overtones, this would've been a really good movie.

A strong candidate for the worst film I have ever seen, in fact it barely qualifies as a film at all, more like one long tortuous therapy session. OK I admit I'm not a Meryl Streep fan - I find her irritating mannerisms very tiresome and here she is worse than ever. But it's not just that; the whole thing is so hollow and frankly embarrassing. Needless to say it is also politically correct - Jones is the worst sort of grumpy old codger;it's all his fault the marriage has gone so stale. Streep is wimpy but angelic and hard done by. There is no way these two would've ever got together.No attempt is made to ask WHY things have got to where they are or what lurks in the background of their marriage. In any case the scenario is so unlike the reality which is that it's mostly women who pass on sex once the children come along. European audiences wince at the American tendency to seek out therapy as the answer to their problems. They know that being 'open' and talking frankly is a high-risk strategy likely to cause more problems that it solves. When Jones is asked about his secret fantasy he mentions the girl next door!! Spare me - we all know if he tried to explain his REAL fantasy,Streep would have the divorce papers on the breakfast table next day..A truly awful film.

..hugely overrated, underneath all the fx, cgi, noise and hand-held camera and despite the convoluted storyline, the film is nothing more than standard Hollywood fare. The troubled hero with a past history of marital problems (yawn)...you just know for certain as soon as you see his two kids that the ending will see him reunited with them..no surprises there then. Far too long and absurdly pretentious at times, I burst out laughing at one point when someone said "Just a minute, whose subconscious are we trying to enter now". Give me a break (and a story that has a narrative I can follow). Trying to convey the world of dreams in movies is always destined to fail. Dreams are highly personal experiences. Ever tried telling someone what you were dreaming about only to think 'Well it's very hard to explain'? Exactly - dreams don't follow any sort of cohesive narrative rather they are a series of apparently unconnected images and scenarios that appear to make no sense whatsoever.

Warner Brothers are simply cashing in on their rights to the original title of the 1953 classic. This version has nothing to do with the original 'House of Wax' (which in itself was a remake of the 1932 'Mystery of the Wax Museum'). Here we have a variation on what is basically a fairly standard teen slasher pic where the kids do all sorts of stupid things they know they shouldn't do and end up paying the price. There are some nice touches such as the house itself being made entirely of wax which makes for a good all-consuming fire at the end. But not enough has been made of the potential to exploit the theme of making waxworks out of living humans(this only happens to one of the kids, sadly NOT Paris Hilton).All that machinery and boiling cauldrons of wax is wasted as two of the party survive to battle it out with the forces of evil in all too predictable ending. The twist right at the very end adds nothing. Now can we have a REAL remake of 'House of Wax' please.