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Reel magic: The Hobbit, Kill the Messenger, Dying of the Light
With the Dubai International Film Festival in full swing, Adam Zacharias delves through the UAE's latest cinema releases
- PUBLISHED: Thu 11 Dec 2014, 2:04 PM UPDATED: Fri 19 Jul 2024, 9:45 AM
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
Peter Jackson closes his Hobbit trilogy with The Battle of the Five Armies.
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Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) and company must battle the evil Sauron's orc army, while preventing Smaug the dragon (Benedict Cumberbatch) from destroying Middle Earth.
Critics have praised the 144-minute epic, although the general consensus is that it fell short of Jackson's Lord of the Rings glory.
“The trilogy goes out with not merely a bang, but a 45-minute baroque, virtuoso battle scene that could be an entire tragi-comic film in itself,” said Kate Muir of The Times.
“At once the trilogy's most engrossing episode, its most expeditious and also its darkest – both visually and in terms of the forces that stir in the hearts of men, dwarves and orcs alike,” said Scott Foundas of Variety.
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies currently has a 79% rating on rottentomatoes.com and a 9.4/10 rating on imdb.com.
Kill the Messenger
Jeremy Renner stars in this true story about an investigative journalist and his disturbing findings regarding the crack epidemic in the United States and the CIA's link to cocaine smuggling.
Gary Webb incurs the wrath of both drug lords and the American authorities when he reveals that the CIA is using profits from cocaine being brought into the States to fund Nicaraguan rebels.
Also appearing in the thriller are Rosemarie DeWitt, Michael Sheen, Andy Garcia, Ray Liotta and Mary Elizabeth Winstead.
Kill the Messenger has received positive reviews, without making much of a dent at the box office.
“Renner brings a dogged yet ebullient quality to Webb. It's a terrific, wound-up yet thoughtful performance that conveys a sense of conviction with an undercurrent of fragility,” said Philippa Hawker of The Sydney Morning Herald.
“Drugs, government, truths, moustaches. Kill the Messenger is an admirable journalism thriller that takes on a lot of big subjects,” said Adam Graham of The Detroit News.
Kill the Messenger currently has a 77% rating on rottentomatoes.com and a 7.1/10 rating on imdb.com.
Dying of the Light
Another week, another profoundly awful Nicolas Cage movie.
Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver) writes and directs Dying of the Light, a thriller which pits a veteran CIA agent against a terrorist who tortured him years before.
However, in October Schrader claimed on Facebook that distributor Lionsgate had taken the film away from him and drastically altered it in numerous ways. “We lost the battle,” he said of the movie, which went on to be panned by critics.
“A weirdly misshapen, fitfully intriguing depiction of one man's wayward quest for justice, plainly compromised in ways that only a director's cut could properly illuminate,” said Justin Chang of Variety.
“A dim, dull effort,” said Kyle Smith of The New York Post.
Dying of the Light currently has a 6% rating on rottentomatoes.com and a 4.5/10 rating on imdb.com.