Cinema Effect

Digg or die baby and we are digging Digger! Question Of The Week: What is the worst thing you've posted on social media? Post your answer in the comments below to be featured on next week's episode. Next Week's Film: The Social Reckoning Timestamps ;) 0:00 - Review 1:22:00 - What We've Been Watching 1:27:10 - Question Of The Week

We're over 300 episodes in, we really need to stop ending so many of our sentences with 'I don't know'. My close personal friend Paul Anderson returns yet again; this time, however, he is unable to avoid the scathing remarks of my narrow-minded co-host (Zac). The Three Musketeers (2011) is a liberally adapted swashbuckling family adventure film that may have Dumas rolling in his gr...

Don't look now! For if you do you will be stuck with a terribly dull and underwhelming legendary film for the next 100 minutes. That's right we're not afraid to diss Nicolas Roeg on this show, and to be frank he kinda deserves it for putting this out. Like many of his other works, Don't Look Now is considered essential viewing within the classic cinema cannon and in regards to the...

The actors play themselves, the story is super meta, the camera hardly cuts and its one of the best movies we've ever reviewed. Alejandro G Iñárritu's seminal, Best Picture winning film gets the final seal of approval that YOU have been waiting for to know whether it's worth watching. The glowing comments are accompanied by an in depth conversation about characters, themes and technica...

We’re going all the way back to the early days of the career of mythic director Terrence Malick with our first viewing of Days of Heaven (1978), starring Richard Gere, Brooke Adams, and Sam Shepard. The film follows an impoverished couple posing as siblings while working on a wealthy farmer’s land in the 1910s, where a deceptively simple plan gradually develops into a tragic love triangle. Its jou...

My close, personal friend Paul WS Anderson makes his much awaited return to the show. The consensus the second time around from the skeptics? He's still doing pretty good! Event Horizon has garnered a significant cult following post its rocky box office debut and these days is considered as one of the best efforts of the director. A sci-fi horror tale that strongly embraces its inspirations an...

Mask of the Phantasm is perhaps the most famous Batman movie outside of the live actions yet it remained a gaping hole for each of us on CE until last week. A tie in to the animated series of the 90's, this sleeper hit of a children's film is possibly the most mature analysis of the character in film form as it delves into the mechanism's of why Bruce dons the mask and what could lead...

There is no **BLEEEP** ! Primal Fear is your fairly standard 90's courtroom thriller with a killer twist, this is Edward Norton's first major role! An outstanding performance that run's circles around his veteran co-star making this story a truly thrilling watch. In a story that has every possible avenue of being typical given its ties to religion, the justice system and age-gap relati...

Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty saw the director returning to the theater of war in the Middle East this time examining the long road to finding the most wanted man in history. Jessica Chastain stars as a fresh faced agent tasked with the impossible but armed with any amount of human rights violations to get it done. A brilliant supporting cast brings tension and excitement to even the quie...

Oh that me? Pure aura. Press tours, polyester edits and a hunger for Tom to return as Spidey on our big screens after a 5 year drought has created the worlds newest and fastest billion dollar movie. No multiverse, no surprise cameo's, a world of quality. Holland and friends play their characters better than ever, and new comer Sadie Sink is fierce in her role introducing the next era of the MC...

We're back with another Frank Miller adaptation, again at the hands of a mediocre director who sure as hell has flair. The testosterone fueled anthology film features a star studded cast including Bruce Willis, Clive Owen, Mickey Rourke, Rosario Dawson and genuinely so much more as they reckon with the corruption and violence of Basin City. With a style that truly transports you into the pages...

Defy the gods and the source material Once again a Christopher Nolan film gets discussed and dissected by three adoring white fan boys, with his most recent effort being an adaptation of Homer's epic, The Odyssey. An incredibly old story about a man going there and back again with the help and hinderance of some wacky creatures. Each of us have a different relationship to the source but that d...

After years of threatening to get around to it, we’ve finally watched and reviewed Netflix’s globe trotting action thriller The Gray Man (2022). Directed by Joe and Anthony Russo, the film stars Ryan Gosling as an elite CIA operative, with Chris Evans, Ana de Armas, and Billy Bob Thornton. We compare the Russo brothers’ work here to the rest of their filmography and discuss how their reputation ha...

There really is no better time to review Zack Snyder’s 300 than for episode 301 of Cinema Effect. Starring Gerard Butler, Lena Headey, David Wenham, and Michael Fassbender, this stylised action epic retells the legendary Battle of Thermopylae, where King Leonidas and 300 Spartan warriors make their final stand against the invading Persian army. Despite being familiar with many of its iconic moment...

It’s pretty unbelievable that we’ve reached the 300th episode of Cinema Effect, so what better way to celebrate than with the grand finale to one of our favourite franchises, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, after spending the last eight months revisiting the entire saga. The film brings Harry’s journey to its explosive conclusion as the Battle of Hogwarts erupts and the fate of the w...

We have unintentionally ended up reviewing every Steven Spielberg alien film on the podcast (yes, we’re counting War of the Worlds, whether he does or not), and now we bring that journey home with Disclosure Day. Starring Emily Blunt, Josh O'Connor, Colman Domingo, and Colin Firth (who sports an exceptional beard), Spielberg’s latest blockbuster surprised us in more ways than one, blending a m...

There’s only one way to tackle Oldboy, Park Chan-wook’s revered South Korean masterpiece (not the Hollywood remake!), and that’s to dive in head first. The film follows a man who is mysteriously imprisoned for 15 years before being suddenly released and given the chance to uncover who ruined his life and why. Needless to say, this is a dark, twisted, and often confronting cinematic experience that...

Continuing our trend of reviewing films with "Mortal" in the title, we arrive at Mortal Engines (2018), Peter Jackson’s attempt to launch a new fantasy blockbuster franchise on the scale of The Lord of the Rings. Starring Hera Hilmar, Robert Sheehan, Hugo Weaving, and Jihae, the film is set in a post-apocalyptic world where moving cities roam the Earth and consume smaller settlements for...

We’re very excited to finally reach the point in the Harry Potter saga where we can celebrate the often overlooked Deathly Hallows Part 1, a film that deserves far more love than it gets. While some viewers dismiss it as the "boring one" because they are impatiently waiting for the action packed spectacle of Part 2, we think they are missing some of the strongest character writing in the...

Yeah baby, yeah! Liam has successfully bullied the Austin Powers franchise onto the show through our Instagram poll, which means it is time to revisit Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. Starring Mike Myers in the dual roles of Austin Powers and Dr Evil alongside Elizabeth Hurley, the film follows a groovy British spy thawed out in the 1990s to stop his old nemesis from taking over the wo...

Wind River is a film we’ve talked about reviewing behind the scenes for a very long time, so now that the moment has finally arrived, it had self-imposed high expectations to live up to. Written and directed by Taylor Sheridan, this modern western thriller serves as the final chapter in his frontier trilogy, transporting the genre to the frozen landscapes of Wyoming in a setting that feels both ha...

Our familiarity with The Mortal Instruments as a young adult franchise varied wildly between us, which made the film adaptation The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones both a fresh discovery and a revisit more than a decade later. Starring Lily Collins, Jamie Campbell Bower, Lena Headey, and Jared Harris, the film follows Clary Fray as she uncovers a hidden world of Shadowhunters (which is annoyingl...

We may have unfortunately lost a good chunk of the opening of this episode to technical issues, but that was not going to stop us from diving into Is This Thing On? (2025), the latest film from master auteur Bradley Cooper. The big question going in, can he make a movie that isn't awards bait? Following a struggling New York couple at a crossroads, the story centres on Will Arnett’s character...

We have peaked. Our journey through the franchise has led us not only to peak Harry Potter, but peak cinema with Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, a thoroughly engaging entry that perfectly balances the series’ biggest dramatic moments with some of its funniest, immersing us in the Hogwarts school year better than ever. Directed once again by David Yates, the film shines through its richly d...

A gritty and undeniably cool WW2 film, Fury (2014) sees director David Ayer (pronounced Air) at a point before he “lost the sauce,” delivering a brutal story set in the final days of Nazi Germany. Starring Brad Pitt, Shia LaBeouf, Logan Lerman, Jon Bernthal, and Michael Peña, the film follows a tight knit tank crew navigating the horrors of war from inside their claustrophobic steel machine. The c...