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Stories and analysis from The Northern Express Herald.

Movie review: Risen

This American film starts off as as swords and sandals detective story, with Jesus the missing person, before defaulting to a hollow gospel drama.

Our review of 10 Cloverfield Lane

Producer J.J. Abrams sure knows how to release a film. In 2007, he launched a mysterious trailer for an unnamed sci-fi film at a Transformers screening, creating a buzz that saw Cloverfield, as it was soon to be known, collect just over US$170 million.

Review: Baron Cohen film does it again

The things you learn at the pictures. Had I not seen Sacha Baron Cohen's new film, I might have gone through life sublimely unaware of the word "bukkake", let alone the concept. That may have been no bad thing, of course.

Alex Casey: Hail, Caesar!

The latest offering from the inimitable Coen brothers is <i>Hail, Caesar!</i>, a goofy love letter to the golden age of Hollywood.

Movie review: Mahana

The first local release of the year is an impressive adaptation of Witi Ihimaera's 1994 novel Bulibasha: King of the Gypsies.

Review: Rom-com's lesson fails to deliver

Director Christian Ditter has already tackled rom-coms with British film Love, Rosie, but in How to Be Single he goes from riffing on one relationship to wrangling a clutch of them, with the ensemble piece getting the better of him.

Review: Will Smith can't save Concussion

Viewed from here, where American football remains, for most of us, a curiosity, this film about a doctor who challenged the sports-entertainment industrial complex behind the game is something of a revelation.

You need to see this film

Journalists are constantly exasperated by the depiction of journalism in the movies: crusading reporters who never take notes write their own (very bad) headlines for stories based on hunches, improbable disclosures, lucky breaks and dramatic confrontatio

Review: Love conquers sexual politics

Predictably and understandably, this film about one of the first known people to undergo a surgical sex change has been criticised for tweaking the historical record and, more sophisticatedly, for its heteronormative approach to a transgender story.

Review: Oscar nominated film 'bland'

It's hardly surprising that stories of immigrants to the Land of the Free have such a proud cinematic history: the immigrant experience has everything - risk, longing, regret, hope, danger - that makes for great drama.