Closed Circuit review: cheating in the War on Terror
Eric Bana and Rebecca Hall are as engaging as ever, and the film raises intriguing issues concerning the “War on Terror”; pity the plot descends into the ridiculous.
MI6
Red 2 review: global positioning
Smart, breezy spy action, with an of-the-moment vibe that takes it post-post-9/11 and into the Wikileaks era of global politics.
Skyfall movie review
What we witness here is the destruction of the old Bond mystique, and the creation of a new one. This is the sneaky cleverness of the film: it is, at last, going to tell us why Bond still matters.
Haywire (review)
There’s a lot of fight in Haywire, but very little punch — it starts to feel very grim and plodding…
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy movie review: let the spy one in
Why does no one ever intone at me and tell me to go to Budapest and wear polyester and smoke cigarettes and get all espionagey, dammit?
Red (review)
Of all the washed-up washed-out over-the-hill too-old-for-this-shit action-hero movies we’ve had thrown at us this year — The A-Team, The Losers, The Expendables — Red is by far the most amusing, the most clever, the most tongue-in-cheek, the most fun (and I say that as someone who mostly liked those other movies).
Duplicity movie review: good clean fluff
It’s not that I don’t like fluff: it’s that I don’t like dumb fluff. And yet clever fluff is so very rare. So of course I cheer a hearty “Hoorah!” for Duplicity.
