Martin Cuff Consulting

In Cowboys and Aliens, it’s 1873 and a skinny, craggy Daniel Craig awakes in the Arizona desert with no recollection of who he is nor how he got there, and with a strange, beeping, modern metal bangle strapped to his wrist. When he arrives at the nearest town, it’s attacked by aliens with vastly superior [...]

There’s a bomb on a commuter train heading for Chicago. We know this because, in Source Code, we see it explode. And then we see it explode again. And again. And again. And each time, an army pilot Colter Stevens (doe-eyed Jake Gyllenhaal) who’s working for a secretive new military time-travel program, is sent back [...]

The Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a glossy re-imagining of how the world of the seventies Sci-Fi tv series – where talking chimps rule the world and humans are dumb slave labor – comes about. This time, a crumply scientist (James Franco) tries to cure Alzheimers and creates a brain potion that’s [...]

Fast Five is the latest in a series of shoot-em-up actioners staring Vin Diesel and Paul Walker. The films seem to be about a gang of honorable car thieves, from what I can tell. (No, I haven’t seen any of the earlier ones, but I’ve seen enough trailers to have a bit of an idea [...]

Super 8 is cracking entertainment – tense, stylish, snappy and extremely loud. Produced by Spielberg and directed by JJ Abrams, it’s a cinematic mash-up, pitching the kids from Stand by Me onto the set of Cloverfield. Set in small town Ohio in the early seventies, a group of nerdy kids shooting their own zombie movie [...]

Aliens arrive. They blow shit up. Skyline is just my kind of movie. Except it’s not, really. It’s sort of Cloverfield-in-LA, but way less atmospheric. Everyone tries hard enough (scream!) and the sfx are really quite chilling at times, but it kind of goes nowhere and it left me all a bit meh. If I [...]

In February 2002, then US Defense Secretary, the charmless sociopath Donald Rumsfeld said of Iraq: “We know there are known knowns: there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns: that is to say we know there are things we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns [...]

Late in the day, two extremely cute boys, and some arbitrary chick scam a free pass on a chairlift at a ski resort. Through a cruel twist of fate, the lift stops with them dangling high above the snow, and then the lights go off, and the temperature drops, and the resort staff go home [...]

I caught Across the Universe on tv the other day. It’s the Julie Taymor-directed piece that flung Jim Sturgess into the spotlight, using Beatles songs to move the story forward. (Each of the six leads sing their little lungs out on screen – and jolly well too, it must be said.) At first this conceit [...]

Secretariat is a little film about a huge (and flippin’ phenomenal) horse. In movies of this ilk, we’re used to a lot more “drama”: the horse has to have a breakdown, the jockey has to break his leg, the central relationship has to divorce because of the principle character’s commitment to his/her equine. In Secretariat, [...]