Once the undisputed masters of the animated medium, Disney/Pixar has given us some cause for concern these last few years. Even with the magnificence of Toy Story 3, the abysmal cash-cow of Cars 2 and the lukewarm rehash Brave tarnished that hard won reputation. Indeed, the appearance of another spin-off film, this time a prequel, may have elicited enough screams of horror to power a monster factory for several decades to come. After all, the Academy Award-winning Monsters Inc. is an almost universally beloved film, featuring not only groundbreaking animation but, like the best of Pixar’s work, a beating heart as well. It gave us all permission to believe in the monsters under our beds and in our wardrobes, the same way that the Toy Story films gave us a glimpse into what happens when the humans aren’t looking. With Monsters University, Pixar go a long way towards restoring our faith.

Set about a decade before the original film, young Michael “Mike” Wazowski (voiced by Billy Crystal) can’t wait to start college, working hard and refusing to see any obvious impediments towards becoming a champion “scarer”. James P. “Sulley” Sullivan (voiced by John Goodman) is the complete opposite, a laid-back son of an all-star scarer who chooses to coast on his name and some of his natural ability. When the duo is kicked out of college by Dean Hardscrabble (Helen Mirren) due to a mishap, they must put aside their differences and team up with the forgotten members of Monsters University to compete for re-entrance via a series of gruelling tasks.

The problem with prequels is that we ultimately known how things are going to turn out. This foreknowledge often undercuts any potential for drama. However, this isn’t a problem when the storytelling is compelling and the characters are engaging. Crystal and Goodman’s interplay was one of the highlights of the original film, and despite a slight shift in their relationship, it remains the central appeal of Monsters University. Likewise, Pixar’s messages of inclusiveness and unlikely camaraderie have been staples of their films since Toy Story, and here Pixar filters it through every college film from National Lampoon’s Animal House to Revenge of the Nerds, right down to a scene in which Mike rides a pig-like creature across campus. Monsters University is just about accepting others for who they are (“Oozma Kappa! We’re O.K!”) and finding your own place, and it’s this positive power that gives the film an enormous amount of infectious energy. Director and co-writer Dan Scanlon, who is unique (for Pixar) in that his previous credits including a short animation and a live-action mockumentary, throws in a number of gags that will sail over younger audiences, but rest assured: there really is something in there for everybody.

It goes without saying that the animation is gorgeous. The original film was known for refining the technology by which fur could be rendered in detail on screen, but Pixar are never content to rest on their laurels. Sully, for example, now has over 5.5 million individual hairs (we counted), with the hundreds of people working on the film also doubling their “render farm” to produce this monolith in a lean four years. Individual flags and blades of grass sway in the breeze, and thanks to a process they developed called “global illumination”, light behaves the same way it would in the real world. A scene where Dean Hardscrabble descends from the rafters of the classroom is beautifully lit, creating an effortlessly sinister atmosphere. However, like The Muppets, the monster characters are scary-looking but strangely appealing, so the little ones will find them funny and cuddly. It’s a beautiful marriage of technology and art, and here none of those technological advances are had at the expense of its indelible charm.

So few films this blockbuster season are filled with a simple “goodness”, that trait often misjudged for tweeness or substitute saccharine by lessor studios (or Pixar on a Cars day). Monsters University has all the irreverence of a college caper, but the warmth of its predecessor. Welcome back, Pixar: we’ve missed you.

Monsters University is released in Australia on 20 June 2013 from Disney. It screen in the US from 21 June 2013.

Despite the lack of alcohol, Prohibition must have been fun. The movies certainly paint it as the most exciting time to be alive since saddles got sore on their journey westward ho. Indeed, next to the Western, the truest form of American filmmaking has often been the tales of cops and robbers coming out of a thirteen-year dry spell of temperance gone mad. From the White Heat of the 1930s through to television’s Boardwalk Empire, the crime that spun out of this period is sexy and almost aspirational. For author F. Scott Fitzgerald, who published The Great Gatsby in 1922, it was a time of social upheaval, great change and extreme decadence. Baz Luhrmann has paid attention to the last bit of that at least.

Paris, 1900. The women he loves is dead. Scratch that. Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) is a depressed alcoholic in a sanatorium, recounting to a psychiatrist the events that led to his disgust with humanity. During the summer of 1922, he was a Yale graduate and a bond salesman renting a house in Long Island next to the enigmatic Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio). After driving across the bay to visit his cousin Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan), and her husband, Tom (Joel Edgerton), his destiny alters when neighbour Gatsby invites him to a lavish do. Drawn into the world of rich and infamous, Gatsby only has one desire in life: to reconnect with Daisy, the one he thinks got away.

With all of the fine nuance that the description on the back of some crib notes provides, the first half of Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby is a solid remake of his own Moulin Rogue, itself reworking the themes of La Bohème and Romeo and Juliet he had already played with.  The first part of the film is undeniably gorgeous, with Gatsby’s lavish soirées the kind of unsubtle spectacular spectacular that our Baz never fails to pull off. Only here is the superfluous 3D an asset, completely immersing the viewer in this world of glitter. It’s unclear as to whether Luhrmann has read the novel, although he does a fairly good job of convincing us that he was at least aware of the period it’s set in. Yet as a drug and alcohol fuelled party erupts in a New York apartment, to the strains of a Jay-Z/Kanye West tune that compares the condition of African Americas to “something like the Holocaust”, one has to wonder if Luhrmann even listened to the songs on his own playlist.

As the film shifts gears into the second and much darker half of the story, Luhrmann makes good on the promise of a modern interpretation of this story. Here the cast get to outshine the sets, and in the case of DiCaprio, he delivers a star turn that might make him the definitive Jay Gatsby. We have no problem in believing in Mulligan’s doe-eyed surface sheen or Edgerton’s arrogant self-assuredness either. It’s only the wooden Maguire, whose droning narration plagues the entire film, that fails to convince in the slightest. His unfortunate intonations barely carry any weight, and his presence is, at least in this screen version, perfunctory.

If The Great Gatsby is a failed adaptation, it wouldn’t be the first, as it’s the writer’s voice that is crucial to selling the narrative. It’s no wonder that the flamboyant leanings of Luhrmann is able to perfectly capture the hollowness of the first half without the corresponding depth of the denouement. As Gatsby parties break out around the world, complete with flapper girls and tuxedoed boofheads, it will be this first half that gets remembered, replicated, remixed and regurgitated until the fad fades. Everything else is merely inconsequential.

The Great Gatsby was released in Australia on 30 May 2013 from Roadshow Films.

A funny thing happened to Todd Phillips on the way to The Hangover Part III. Although he began his successes with the irreverent Road Trip (2000) and the retro fun of Starsky & Hutch (2006), the unlikely hit The Hangover (2009) changed his destiny somewhat. His follow-up film, Due Date (2010), was significantly darker, trading laughs for shadenfreude, a trait that has begun to characterise all of his works since then. As such, The Hangover Part II became an unwieldy retread of the first film, an unabashed piece of fan-service that made a literal monkey out of everyone involved. Yet for all of its faults, the third film can’t be accused of washing, rinsing and repeating. It is an entirely different beast altogether.

Following an unfortunate incident with a giraffe on the freeway, Wolfpack members Phil (Bradley Cooper) and Stu (Ed Helms) agree to stage an intervention on the increasingly erratic Alan (Zach Galifianakis). Driving him to a mental health facility, they are run off the road and confronted by Marshall (John Goodman), who has some unfinished business with the croooked Mr. Chow (Ken Jeong). With Doug (Justin Bartha) held captive, the Wolfpack must hit the road and find Chow before it’s too late.

The Hangover Part III may be the first film in the series to not actually feature a hangover of any kind. At the very least, the third outing deserves props for trying something different with the series. So much so that it is also the first film in the saga that has dispensed with the need to be ‘outrageously’ funny. Indeed, for much of the film, audiences may be wondering if they’ve mistakenly wandered into a parallel Hangover universe. All the faces are the same, and some well placed cameos and locations from the first film (an ageless Heather Graham, for example) create a semblance of nostalgia that was sorely missing in the second entry. Yet it also seems to be consciously avoiding comedy territory, making a decent enough action caper along the way, albeit one that has little in common with the previous entries.

While the Wolfpack has worked well as an ensemble in the past, the shifting dynamics of the cast signal some occasionally clashing egos. Galifianakis’s Alan has gone from being endearingly ineffective to flat-out toxic. This may be the catalyst for the film, but his presence is now one of perverse frustration rather than comical annoyance. Perhaps the one saving grace is his interplay with Melissa McCarthy, in a small but memorable role. Similarly, Ken Jeong’s Chow was a punchline performer in the first film, literally leaping out of a car boot and into our hearts. His expanded role wears his concept thin, and any love for the character tends to get washed away in a series of increasingly ridiculous stunts. Meanwhile, Bradley Cooper is just cashing the cheques at this point, and Ed Helms (a highlight of the second film) is relegated to a purely perfunctory performance.

The Hangover Part III is a solid conclusion to the series, making up for much of the repetition of the second outing. It just can’t rightly be called a comedy, but that doesn’t mean that a parachute sequence over the Las Vegas strip, a few heists and a sequence with an incredibly creepy child can’t still entertain. By the time the end credits roll, there is something more familiar happening, and this one end-credits scene provides more laughs than most of the film. It’s more caper than comedy, but at least you won’t entirely regret it in the morning.

The Hangover Part III was released in Australia on 23 May 2013 from Roadshow Films.

The infamous Riddick has been left for dead on a sun-scorched planet that appears to be lifeless. Soon, however, he finds himself fighting for survival against alien predators more lethal than any human he’s encountered. The only way off is for Riddick to activate an emergency beacon and alert mercenaries who rapidly descend to the planet in search of their bounty.

Directed by David Twohy, Riddick is released in US cinemas on 6 September 2013 from Universal. It hits Australian cinemas on 12 September from Roadshow.

Atwell told the publication:

“Fans of the first film really wanted to find out what happened to Peggy afterwards, so Marvel are also making a short film, which is basically ‘What Peggy Did Next’, which will be shown at Comic-Con [the annual international pop culture convention held in San Diego] and be on the DVD extras of the second film.

So as well as doing a bit in the new film, I’ve got a whole new spin-off short film. It has been great to be back in training with the stunt co-ordinators, kicking some butt again.”

Previous One-Shots have included The Consultant, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Thor’s Hammer and Item 47.

Marvel’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier will be released on 4 April 2013 from Disney.

What starts out as a fun road trip for the Toy Story gang takes an unexpected turn for the worse when the trip detours to a roadside motel. After one of the toys goes missing, the others find themselves caught up in a mysterious sequence of events that must be solved before they all suffer the same fate in this Toy Story of Terror.

The 30 minute special, which we first heard about back in October last year, directed by Angus MacLane (Small Fry). This marks the first foray into television for the franchise since the cinematic close of the series.

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The cast are showcased, including Agent Grant Ward (Brett Dalton), highly trained in combat and espionage, Agent Melinda May (Ming-Na Wen) expert pilot and martial artist, Agent Leo Fitz (Iain De Caestecker); brilliant engineer and Agent Jemma Simmons (Elizabeth Henstridge) genius bio-chemist. Joining them on their journey into mystery is new recruit and computer hacker Skye (Chloe Bennet). Of course, the cause for excitement is that Agent Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg) lives again.

The show will debut on Tuesdays in the Fall 2013 season in the US.

IT IS ACCOMPLISHED! First draft of CLERKS III is 137 pages. Plays like the EMPIRE STRIKES BACK of the… instagram.com/p/ZQR3qqxywh/

— KevinSmith (@ThatKevinSmith) May 13, 2013

Smith had been fairly open about the production process and some of the legal difficulties around this film on his podcast Hollywood Babble-On, which is co-hosted with Ralph Garman.

Some of the cast, including Jeff Anderson, believe that they are still owed money from the Weinsteins from the profits of Clerks II. This means it is still possible that the film may not see the light of day. Either way, a new old-school Smith film, reportedly about dealing with the gang in their 40s, is something to get excited about.

Joss Whedon’s fresh take on William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing has received wide critical acclaim, praised for its humour and “inspired” interpretation of the Bard’s comedic play (Variety). Empire magazine described Whedon and Shakespeare as “a perfect match”.

Joss Whedon’s (The Avengers, ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’, Cabin in the Woods, Toy Story) modern re-telling of Much Ado About Nothing stars Whedon film and television regulars Amy Acker (‘Angel’, ‘Dollhouse’), Alexis Denisof (‘Buffy’, ‘Angel’, ‘Dollhouse’), Clark Gregg (The Avengers), Fran Kranz (Cabin in the Woods, ‘Dollhouse’) and Nathan Fillion (‘Buffy’, ‘Firefly’, Serenity).

Using the original text, adapted by Joss Whedon, the story of sparring lovers Beatrice (Acker) and Benedick (Denisof) offers a dark, sexy, funny and occasionally absurd view of the intricate game that is love.

Much Ado About Nothing was shot in and around Joss Whedon’s own home in Santa Monica, California, while he was still working on the blockbuster superhero film The Avengers. Co-produced by Whedon’s wife Kai Cole, the film was made with close friends and a sincere love for the classic text.

The projections, accompanied by music from the series, will be shown 10 minutes to every hour until midnight after the kick-off.

According to Doctor Who TV:

Destination NSW has collaborated with BBC Worldwide Australia and New Zealand to ensure local fans of Doctor Who can celebrate this major Anniversary through an evening of entertainment, featuring amazing light projections and a special cinema screening of two episodes from the series.

“This collaboration sees Australian creative innovators, The Spinifex Group, working with the Doctor Who team to create projections that will deliver a worldwide unique birthday celebration for the shows legion of fans, and our own Vivid Sydney is the perfect environment for this experience,” Mr Stoner said.

Doctor Who fans will also be able to take in a special cinema screening at nearby Dendy Opera Quays, featuring two thrilling episodes from Series Seven Part 1: Asylum of the Daleks and The Angels Take Manhattan which see the Doctor confront two of his most terrifying foes – the Daleks and the Weeping Angels – and say a heart-breaking farewell to his companions Amy and Rory Pond.

There will also be a competition allowing fans to submit a picture of themselves dressed as their favourite monster or Doctor at Vivid Sydney.

See below for Vivid Sydney at Customs House light and sound times PLUS Dendy cinema screenings:

Vivid Sydney
Customs House, 31 Alfred Street Sydney
Times: 6.50pm; 8.50pm, 10.50pm & 11.50pm
www.vividsydney.com

Dendy Cinema Screenings
Circular Quay – 5pm, 7pm & 9pm
Newtown – TBC
Check dendy.com.au for more session times and locations.

Fans outside of Sydney can also catch the screenings. Check out the Doctor Who TV Events page for more details.

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