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Men In Black 3

It’s not a sequel that needed to be made, but thanks to the charm of its leads and a tone that harks back to the wit and humour of the original, it’s a pretty enjoyable trip.

Bel Ami

The excellent female support cast saves this patchy effort, which is let down by its leading man and a flat screenplay.

The Dictator

A disappointing, often repulsive and mean-spirited mess of a film with seemingly only one real criterion on its agenda: to shock and offend.

The Woman In Black

Packed with atmosphere, this old-fashioned but deftly told ghost story delivers ample chills and thrills.

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Charlie St. Cloud (Film)

by Julian Shaw | September 20, 2010 16:09 | Edited September 20, 2010 16:10

While the script is contrived and sometimes sappy, Zac Efron anchors the film with a heartfelt performance.

You can feel the strain of Zac Efron's efforts to man up in Charlie St. Cloud, an impossibly lustrous studio film with a supernatural bent, but it's not coming from the actor himself. He's rock-solid at the core of an unashamedly syrupy flick that occasionally churns like noisy machinery around his airbrushed bodaciousness. Based on this effort, however, and his solid work in Me And Orson Welles, Efron has definitely emerged from the credibility abyss of being Disney's handpicked wunderkind for Generation Y courtesy of his lead role in the teen phenomenon that is High School Musical.

 

Efron plays the eponymous Charlie, a cemetery caretaker and sailor-in-decline, haunted by his part behind the wheel in a car accident that killed his eleven-year-old brother, Sam (Charlie Tahan, a child actor who more than holds up his side of the screen). At twilight, Charlie haunts an ambiguous realm in his North Western town where he catches the sunset with his deceased brother, playing ball and shooting the shit. He's only torn from the supernatural play dates when he follows his real-world affections for fellow sailor, Tess (the plucky Amanda Crew), which leads Charlie to make a significant choice between life and unreality.

 

Armchair critics will probably pick off Efron's apparent insubstantiality as a problem, but the young thesp truly offers a heartfelt core to a tricksy and contrived film that trades in M. Night Shyamalan-level cloying metaphysics. Leave the theatre and you'll be puzzling over the cobbled-together spirituality of the script, but FILMINK's money is that in the darkened anonymity of the theatre, you'll be enjoying every sappy twist along the way. And hey, that Efron kid ain't too bad...you just might not want to tell your mates that you think that.