Martin Cuff Consulting

Steven Soderbergh, no slouch when it comes to thrilling, high-end drama, now turns his attention to Haywire. It’s one of those “I’m-a-spy-but-I’ve-been-betrayed-by-my-bosses-and-now-I’m-on-the-run-to-save-my-life-and-clear-my-name” kind of movies. It stars Antonio Banderas, Michael Douglas, Michael Fassbender and Channing Tatum – all great – but the star of the show is Gina Carano, an attractive Mixed Martial Artist (and [...]

I liked Chronicle. Set in Seattle but filmed in Cape Town, it tells the low-key tale of three high school kids who are exposed to something alien that gives them super-human powers. The difference here is that not all of the three are particularly well-balanced human beings and they therefore deal with their ‘gifts” in [...]

I was wondering how they’d turn a dodgy board game into a blockbuster aliens-blow-shit-up sci-fi spectacle. I thought they might skip the strategy stuff altogether and I was really pleasantly surprised how they pulled it off (it’s actually pretty inspired, something to do with tsunami buoys – seriously.) And whilst there’s little character development, some [...]

OK, hands up if you hated The Help? Go on. Did you find it offensive that Hollywood can only present black experience filtered through the prism of a white narrator? Really? You did? Well, you know what? – and I’ll try to say this nicely: you are a moron. You may have a genuine grievance [...]

As the short, cold summer draws to a close, Old Russia and New Russia collide, at a remote meteorological station in the Russian Arctic. New Russia is Pasha, an easy-going, feckless pretty-boy college student (Grigoriy Dobrygin) with a pierced ear and a soundtrack smashing into his headphones. Old Russia is Sergei, a stolid old Arctic [...]

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is the slow and mesmerizingly hypnotic Thai tale of villager Boonmee, who, together with various kindly ghosts and spirits, recalls his previous incarnations to try to understand why he is dying. It’s thus quite bizarre, other-worldly (the scene with the catfish is pretty disturbing) and even musical [...]

A group of five friends hiking in the Scottish wilderness stumbles across a young Serbian girl, kidnapped and buried alive deep in the mountains. As they try to rescue her, across some of the most difficult countryside, they are pursued by brutally efficient kidnappers, and by the girl’s father, a Serbian war criminal who’s not [...]

I always wonder how and why movies like Mirror Mirror get green-lit. I mean, teen boys aren’t exactly clamoring for Snow White as a super-heroine, aliens don’t blow shit up, there are no car chases starring cool Ryan Gosling. So who persuades who that such a film needs funding? Perplexing. Yet Mirror Mirror succeeds, I [...]

The Hunger Games – the gazillion dollar box office success story – is set in a dystopian future where an uneasy peace is enforced nearly a century after a brutal civil war in North America. As penance for their part in the uprising against the central power, the districts outlying the Capitol are forced once [...]

I think whoever was in charge of marketing Beginners was a bit of a genius. As far as I can tell, the film is being punted that it’s the bitter-sweet story of Hal, a widowed 75 year old Museum Director, who comes bursting out of the closet after the death of his wife. It is [...]