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This was an absolutely brilliant film in the ilk of Red Dawn (the original of course) with yet another stunning performance from rising star Saoirse Ronan in the title role.

Taken from an award-winning teen fiction book the story follows a nuclear strike and war in mainland Britain between British Soldiers (the good guys)  and some very Arab-terrorist looking people in black (the bad guys).

Don’t be fooled by the films beginning which resembles The Railway Children, the film soon gets going and pulls no punches. I wondered actually at times whether it was really suitable for teens as it got fairly graphic, then again I suppose these days with the Internet they’ve seen it all…

Unlike Red Dawn the film concentrates more on the affect on the populous of a war and the hardships they endure going from ordinary lives to surviving the horrors of war. No Heroic “Wolverines” here I am afraid, just people running away from terrifying circumstances.

This film was a very good fast-paced action thriller with excellent performances from both Ethan Hawke and Selena Gomez.

Hawke, a former racing car driver, receives a phone call learning his wife has been kidnapped and will be harmed unless he drives a car according to instructions for some criminals. The car is fitted with camera’s so they can watch his every move. Along the way Gomez tries to Car jack him and ends up along for the ride.

The driving sequences in this film were literally breathtaking with hats off to the stunt team involved in the picture. In a lot of ways I was reminded of The Driver with Ryan O’Neal, but that’s hardly a bad thing!

In another instalment of the Fast and The Furious, this year we get Furious 6. It is hard to believe watching this film, that the franchise is about a group of Street Racers led by Vin Diesel getting up to a bit of mischief with muscle cars.

Furious 6 was more like a bond film with the crew pitched as some type of international mercenaries fighting another group of nasty street racers for Interpol (headed up by the Rock of course). Suddenly they have become experts with guns and explosives, computers, you name it; very little grease on their hands here. Back from the dead in a strange twist is Michelle Rodriguez and pretty much everyone from the original movies.

Whilst I enjoyed the film immensely I can’t help but think its kind of getting a bit far from the original idea (good thing in my case as not being a rev head the originals were fairly uninteresting). Muscle cars and rev heads was what gave the franchise the success it has had and I wonder whether its die-hard fans will like the new changes in Furious 6.

Many Words come to mind when I try to describe Bounty Killer, “Childish Violence”, “Comic Book Narrative” are some of them…

Essentially we are confronted with a post apocalyptic wasteland in which Bounty Hunters track down dead-or-alive the greedy corporate executives who brought about the destruction of the world. Now whilst this all sounded like a fairly good premise, when it came to being put into a film the result was an abysmal failure.

Cardboard characters walk their way though an hour and a half or so of fairly uninteresting action sequences and Tarantino-style unnecessary ultra-graphic-violence, give me Endgame any day! The Only mildly redeeming feature was the very beautiful Terminator Kristanna Loken getting around in some type of sixties Barbarella outfit.

This movie looked somewhat interesting in the vein of classic British Sci Fi (even though it is an American film) and this illusion remained for about the first 15 minutes of the film!

After that it quickly turned into a paranoid cold war drama with fairly uninteresting sequences and shaky sets. I won’t spoil the whole story for you by giving out too many details, but this is not exactly the best film ever made.

Having said that, it was not entirely unentertaining and maybe worth a peek on a wet Saturday afternoon.

This was an interesting little Sci-Fi piece if not borrowing very heavily from Apollo 18 and the whole notion that there are all sorts of microbiological nasties lurking out there in space for unsuspecting astronauts.

As the film opens manned (and womaned) missions to Mars appear to be well underway with a survey team digging up bits of rock and sand. Then one of them finds something resembling life and…well I think you can guess the rest.

Whilst I enjoyed the film my only complaint would probably be that a lot of the scenes were too drawn out, especially hours of travelling in Mars dune buggies. Whilst I appreciate this would probably be close to reality and all, something else could perhaps have happened as well. No “Ash is a goddam Robot” moments here (yes it borrowed from Alien also) just here is mars, here is monster, run, run away.

Have you ever seen Friday the 13th? Well just imagine one of those horrible American summer camps with one lowly camper and mix in Friday and you pretty much have Solo!

It was an interesting premise I suppose: In order to prove they have the right stuff to help campers, new counsellors have to spend two days alone on an island just off the camp.

Of course very quickly we realise that the young damsel is not actually alone and the slashing and screams really get started.

Nothing much here, frankly fairly boring but if you like slasher flicks and don’t mind knowing pretty much whodunit in the first half hour of the film (pretty easy to guess this one), give it a go.

An interesting little film from the days when Charlie Sheen was not being rushed into Rehab.  Sheen plays an advisor to the president (Sam Waterson) who wants to take on that mighty nasty military machine that rules America with Corporate money.

Naturally Corporate money has something to say about the kindly Waterson’s plans for scaling down Military spending and a fairly interesting conspiracy flick ensues.

Whilst not nearly as good a film their are strong elements of The Three Days of the Condor in here which makes it quite an enjoyable couple of hours.

Its interesting to see Linda Hamilton of Terminator fame playing a less than burly print journalist, complete with really silly, girly hats.