Tuesday 12 July 2011

Critical Week: Vampires vs wizards

Frankly it's no contest, but UK critics were this past week subjected both the remake of the 1980s schlock horror Fright Night, starring Colin Farrell (above), and the final ever Harry Potter movie, namely Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2. Clearly, Harry's last chapter, packed with action mayhem that ties up every plot thread in rather unnecessary 3D, is going to triumph hugely at the box office. Although the Fright Night remake will offer some good fun to scary movie fans (if not many actual scares). Whatever, pretty much everyone on earth is aware of the mind-boggling world premiere Potter-mania that engulfed Trafalgar Square last Thursday. I suspect next year's Olympics will pale by comparison.

Also this past week we had the frankly astonishing umpteenth adaptation of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, one of my very favourite books, and perhaps the best ever movie of it, starring the terrific Mia Wasikowska, Michael Fassbender, Jamie Bell and Judy Dench. I mean, honestly. There were also these: the cute but a bit dull teen coming-of-age drama The Art of Getting By, Paddy Considine's rightfully award-winning British drama Tyrannosaur, the ripping Nazi-occult horror The Devil's Rock from New Zealand, and Morgan Spurlock's outrageously entertaining product.placement doc The Greatest Movie Ever Sold.


This coming week we get to see Jennifer Aniston's nasty turn in Horrible Bosses, the 3D animated excitement of The Smurfs, the parallel-world drama Another Earth, the acclaimed horror film Kill List, and the festival favourite Post Mortem.

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