ScreenScribe

Duplicity: TV3, 8.30pm Saturday. The writer/director of Michael Clayton, Tony Gilroy, targets the lighter side of industrial espionage in this sophisticated to-catch-a-spy caper with a droll romantic-comedy streak. Julia Roberts and Clive Owen play transatlantic secret agents-cum-distrustful sweethearts who risk being outfoxed by one another when they team up to scam two multi-nationals. Their skulduggery […]

Cirque Du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant: Sky Movies, 8.30pm Sunday. A fledgling teenage vampire joins a circus of freaks in this tepid horror movie directed by American Pie’s Paul Weitz that’s not as dire as his latest, Little Fockers, but can’t match his In Good Company or American Dreamz. John C. Reilly, Ken Watanabe, Selma Hayek and Josh Hutcherson […]

The Men Who Stare at Goats: Sky Movies, 8.30pm Saturday. Director Grant Heslov, who wrote Good Night, and Good Luck, reunites with George Clooney for this military satire about a top-secret unit of psychic “warrior monks” who try to help “the first superpower to develop superpowers”. It uses a real-life ‘70s New Age forerunner of […]

The Time Traveler’s Wife: Sky Movies, 8.30pm Saturday. Quantum leaps of logic are required to swallow this sci-fi romance about what it’s like to be married to a man who travels back and forth in time without warning. Nothing makes sense, least of all the characters’ attraction for one another — or Ghost screenwriter Bruce […]

Sky Movies will run a mini-George Clooney festival next month when it premieres three of his foxiest films in HD. The aptly named Fantastic Mr Fox will air on January 2 for the first time, the covert intelligence satire, The Men Who Stare at Goats, on January 15, and the exquisitely funny Oscar-nominee, Up in […]

Cast: George Clooney, Vera Farmiga, Anna Kendrick, Jason Bateman, Melanie Lynskey, JK Simmons, Sam Elliott. Director: Jason Reitman. Screenplay: Jason Reitman, Sheldon Turner. Score: Rolfe Kent. Cinematography: Eric Steelberg. The director of Juno, Jason Reitman, teams with an unlikely collaborator, co-screenwriter Sheldon Turner (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning), to land an unusually sophisticated romantic […]

Voices: George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, Michael Gambon, Willem Dafoe, Owen Wilson. Director: Wes Anderson. Screenplay: Wes Anderson, Noah Baumbach. Score: Alexandre Desplat. Cinematography: Tristan Oliver. The Fantastic Mr Fox opens with the frustrated Mr Fox: a decade of domestic drudgery with the wife and kid has him hankering for the old […]

Jane Campion and George Clooney are the only bright stars on this week’s Blu-ray horizon. The NZ-born filmmaker’s first feature since 2003’s In the Cut, Bright Star dramatises the relationship between poet John Keats and next-door neighbour Fanny Brawne, and should look sumptuous in HD. The only Blu-ray review that’s been published online so far […]