Vagabond Unlimited

Boring! Actually after being a little bored with this film, it moved on into unexpected storylines, which proved to be very delicate, intricate and emotional. The film focuses on Luke (Ryan Gosling), who is a stunt biker, moving around the country with a circus. When he stops in a town he stayed in before, he bumps into an old flame, whom he had a fling with the year before. He quickly discovers that he has fathered a child, a young boy with her. He immediately quits his job and plans to stay. But he wants to muscle in on her new relationship. When this badly back fires, he goes looking for money and gets an offer from his new employer who persuades him to carry out a series of bank robberies. When one of the robberies goes wrong he gets killed by a Police officer, leaving behind his young son. The story unfolds from here, and looks intelligently at the longer term consequences. The Policeman’s son and his son meet up when one of them moves schools and they soon come to blows ov...

I really wanted to see this film at the cinema and never got to. After reports from my brother, who did see it at the cinema, that it wasn’t that good, I had an inkling that I may enjoy it more than him, as our tastes in films are slightly at odds. Having said all this, it was almost one of those films that I could sink into and immerse myself in and forget that I am just a lowly viewer sitting at home in front of the box, and push myself into the scenario, no matter how far-fetched. Tom Cruise obviously has a habit of choosing the films he appears in very carefully and apart from the Last Samurai, there hasn’t been I film of his I haven’t liked. Cruise (Jack Harper) is doing a rather cushy job, with a beautiful partner, on top of a tower, which hangs over the cloud line of Earth, which has been damaged by a war with aliens. Humanity has attempted to move to Titan, a moon of Saturn. His job is to maintain massive energy stations taking water and turning it into energy for the ...

Robot and Frank uses the Japanese robot, designed to assist the elderly which in development, fast forwarded to a time when it is fully functional. Frank (Langella) is a thief, who specialised in high end jewelry. When his son gives him a robot (Peter Sarsgaard), he quickly realises that he can use him to help him commit crimes and take him back to his younger days. Feeling invigorated by the challenge, the robot tried to talk him out of it, but eventually, his age and his memory problems get the better of him. The film is mildly entertaining, with a little humour, particularly when the robot meets with another robot and their encounter is underwhelms their owners. Their attempts to insert a little anthropomorphic projection into their relationship fails miserably. I stopped this film after half an hour, then resumed it again later on, which is often a sign that it was failing to maintain my interest. But it was a mild mannered, gentle film which ticked along at a slow but le...

Another Danny Boyle outing, Trance is complex enough to mean that you are unlikely to know what it will be about from the blurb on the case. It follows a debt laden auctioneer whose job it is to safe guard pieces of artwork as they are sold at auction for tens of the millions of pounds. Driven by his gambling debt he helps a gang steal a valuable painting, but when he gets hit on the head during the robbery he forgets when he hid it. The gang then employ a hypnotist to help him remember, but she insists on being part of the gang with a share of the profits. This film starring James McAvoy, has some great twists and turns, a little humour, some blatant female full frontal nudity, (while the men get to maintain their dignity when they appear nude) and some very gratuitous violence (notably a gun shot in the goolies – ouch). Boyle could argue that the female nudity was essential to the storyline. I disagree. As the auctioneers memory returns, we piece together a tightly wound story...