60-second cinema

9 out of 10 A pretty decent heist caper with nicely worked bluffs throughout the film. It may have been overly conscious of its own coolness at times, but at least that was restricted to just the two characters played by George Clooney and Brad Pitt . The rest of the widely-drawn bunch of crooks form a simple, highly skilled, yet still occasionally bumbling crew. Having finally seen this first installment in the series, I’m not surprised it’s gone on to spawn a couple of sequels and will be seeking them out soon.

5 out of 10 Spoiled slightly by the difficulty I had making out what people were saying, thanks to their slightly detached, rapid mumblings and my poor hearing. Even so, I couldn’t help feeling this film thought it was a lot cleverer than it was. Really, it was no more than your average detective film, following a self-confident outsider investigating the death of a friend who’d fallen in with the wrong crowd. Honestly, that’s really all there is to it. How it won a Sundance award is beyond me.

5 out of 10 From the trailer, you might think that this is a film about a mission to save mankind, reigniting the sun with a geet massive bomb. All sounds a bit Armageddon , doesn’t it? Thankfully, it’s not. That said, replacing stock cheese with stock edginess isn’t necessarily enough to save it. While superficially it is about reigniting the sun, it could just as well have been titled “Things Go Wrong In Space”. It’s a bit of a standard sci-fi thriller in that sense and, sadly, barely deviates from the stress/mistakes/tension theme at all. It even goes so far as to steal ideas from 2001: A Space Odyssey . Overall, Sunshine is pretty derivative stuff and, while reasonably well played out, left me a little flat.