Current Attractions: Soviet sci-fi, Gross Germans and the worst Marvel movie ever made

There’s so many great stories on movies online nowadays that you can’t possibly read them all. Save yourself the time and simply read our regular round-up of what’s making us think, laugh, or scratch our heads.

Expendable, Indeed

In Who yelled cut on Hollywood’s great action movies?, Vérité’s Russell Ford wonders why action movies are so stale nowadays. Rather trying to repeat old formulas with ageing stars, Ford points to the success of The Raid and suggests Hollywood try something different for once: originality.

Lefty Logic

The great David Thomson taps into an unusual theory at Sight & Sound: Do our perceptions of a film subtly change when a character is left-handed? He kicks it off with North by Northwest and southpaw leads Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint, before moving onto Nicole Kidman in The Hours and others. 

"No one laughs at a master of Quack Fu!"

With Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy (hopefully) heralding a new era in more adventurous comic book-based movies , Flavourwire’s Jason Bailey re-roasts the studio’s disastrous first major adaptation, Howard the Duck (1986). Poor logic and one-note jokes played a part, as did the infamous “human/duck sex scene”.

Stun guns set to Soviet

Eric Hynes from the New York Times spotlights a new screening series that’s unearthed several rare sci-fi films made within the Soviet Bloc, like Georgiy Daneliya’s Kin-Dza-Dza!, a dystopian comedy featuring “bric-a-brac visuals [that] borrow heavily from Terry Gilliam’s pop surrealism”.

"Fifty Shades of Gross"

Slate’s Rebecca Schuman takes a good hard (and funny) look at the new movie Wetlands, an adaptation she boldly calls “the most obscene non-pornographic movie the Germans have ever made”. Not to brag, but we at SBS knew this months ago: here’s our review from Sundance back in January.