I know I’ll lose a lot of respect from friends and relatives in admitting this but I never read any of John Marsden’s critically acclaimed and fanatically loved young adult book series growing up. Crazy and unbelievable I know, but I guess I was just the sort of kid who was more concerned with where [...]

How To Train Your Dragon tells the story of a village of Vikings who have to battle with constantly being raided and pillaged themselves by swarms of dragons who steal their herds and destroy their homes. Our protagonist is a scrawny Viking-to-be called Hiccup (voiced by Jay Baruchel; animated by many), who also happens to [...]

Halo is a multi-billion dollar franchise that’s taken the gaming world by storm and is slowly making the move to film; this animated DVD release is the first step. When Halo: Combat Evolved was released in 2002, I was one of the many to buy it. Hell, if you owned an XBOX you had to [...]

Fantastic Mr. Fox is a film based on the book by Roald Dahl and while I don’t recall too many specifics of the book, I do recall it being clever, amusing and one of my favourite books for a time. I’m uncertain just how faithful an adaptation this film is, but it does still conjure [...]

Written and directed by Henry Selick and based on the novel by Neil Geiman, this stop-motion animated feature film tells the story of a young girl named Coraline who has just moved into a dreary apartment with her parents. Coraline doesn’t much care for her new home or her weird neighbours – but then she [...]

Acolytes is the tale of three teenagers who discover the buried body of a murdered girl in the woods and become involved in a dangerous game against a serial killer and a rapist. It’s also a cautionary tale of how a film can go astray when the filmmakers indulge in their own fancies rather than [...]

At first the setting of Strait Jacket appears to be somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century. There are steam trains, industrial factories and lots of quaint architecture. But despite this homeliness, in the world of Strait Jacket magic is a common but vital technology that has been harnessed by humans and is used [...]

It’s hard not to like Tim Minchin, the awarding winning actor and comedian is a highly talented and personable individual who has been performing comedy and producing DVDs (in his current style) since 2005. This DVD however is NOT a taping of a performance with some behind the scenes stuff thrown in; it is a [...]

Star Trek first aired in 1966; several TV seasons, films and an animated series later, J.J. Abrams is directing the newest Star Trek film intended to ‘revamp’ the franchise – an aim which this film, simply titled Star Trek, fails at miserably. I should point out that I’ve never gotten into Star Trek, having only [...]