It’s almost July already, half a year passed and the coldest days of winter fast approaching. In a matter of weeks you’ll lose the will to venture out into the Antarctic winds and frosty nights, resigning to the comfort of a warm bed. But your confinement need not be spent watching re-runs of Friends or…
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Watching Burton’s Alice in Wonderland you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s a crossover with no blend. Lewis Caroll’s Through the Looking Glass was the darker tale, but the original remains nothing more than an innocent trip through wonderland. It’s this strange wonderland that Burton pulled up and passed through his nightmare filter, leaving the peculiar…
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You anticipate a film to be vogue when millennial buzzwords and Internet culture forms the first ten minutes. You probably wouldn’t expect that film to be any good either. I didn’t. But by the time Wobble Palace had reached its epilogue, it had convinced me of a couple of things. The first, that it wasn’t…
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Laurent Cantet’s The Workshop is the product of creative introspection, a film that reflects on the subtexts of creating a contentious political thriller, while forwarding a narrative that takes its own advice. It’s a tense and insightful film from the Palme d’Or winner that snowballs radical tensions, while offering audiences a window to Cantet’s writing…
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It’s a familiar name, Christopher Robbins, and it might take a moment or two for you to realise who he is and just how pivotal he was to your childhood. Once heralded as the luckiest boy in the world, Christopher Robbins was not just Winnie-The-Pooh’s best friend in the books, he was a real boy…
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The Alvarez Family’s return on January 26th is an understated mark of success for One Day at a Time. Centring on the lives of a Cuban-American family surviving under the Trump administration, the Netflix sitcom is a cultural manifesto, exploring Latin American family tropes through a period of uncertainty and division in the US. With the…
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Children’s films are usually edifying. It’s a pervasive trait in the genre that sees every Disney protagonist journey through some moral challenge and emerge kinder, more accepting or the hallmark ‘true to oneself’. But without these platitudes guiding the protagonists to their better selves, what does a children’s film really look like? David Alaux has…
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Where most foreigners settling in Japan pass their time in Japanese pubs, English schools or seeking out every piece of longstanding architecture, David Elliot-Jones spent his trying to become famous. And you’ve probably never heard of the guy, but that doesn’t mean he failed. Big in Japan opens with a preface about the seemingly endless…
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When Anthony Pedone took that twenty-hour flight from Texas to Sydney, he wasn’t making a galvanic trip to Australia’s east coast. He’d spent the past decade salvaging his life from a heinous past, with filmmaking becoming primary in his reformation. After producing more than twenty films and directing and writing three, Anthony was invited to…
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It’s a hard fought ninety-seven minutes for the protagonists in An American in Texas, but it’s a fight they could never really win. In Anthony Pedone’s latest, it’s the early 90’s and the U.S has its sights set on a war in the Middle East. As the effects of the conflict settle across the States,…
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When Anthony Pedone took that twenty-hour flight from Texas to Sydney, he wasn’t making a galvanic trip to Australia’s east coast. He’d spent the past decade salvaging his life from a heinous past, with filmmaking becoming primary in his reformation. After producing more than twenty films and directing and writing three, Anthony was invited to…
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Until the day when Pixel Buds are so finessed that we no longer need those streaming lines of text, subtitles will be (for most of us) our one entry to foreign films. It’s rare though for subtitles to impact the film in any other way, but in Yannis Sakaridis’s Amerika Square, those flashing words do…
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Albert Namatjira remains one of Australia’s most revered artists. At the time of his death, his collection exceeded two thousand individual paintings, a perceptive catalogue of the landscapes that form the barren heart of Australia’s central regions. Yet his significance far extends his body of work. In 1957 Albert became the first Aboriginal person to…
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It’s been more than forty years since Emperor Mao Zedong passed, yet the events of the Revolution remain a foreign subject to much of China’s youth. Beneath the doctored history, propaganda and piecemeal curriculum, the impact of Mao’s leadership remains present in the generation that survived it. This is the heart of Nick Torrens’ documentary,…
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Agnieszka Holland creates a character to love and to loath in Spoor, the Polish thriller-comedy that follows one woman’s passion for animal justice in a town that doesn’t share the same sentiments. Spoor, meaning the tracks left by an animal, is a film that rarely falls from the trail, coming together as a poignant comedy…
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Akihiko Shiota’s Wet Woman in the Wind is a feature-length manhunt, set into motion by Shiori (Yuki Mamiya) riding her bike into the sea. She emerges as she entered, focused and unwavering, locking on to Kosuke (Tasuku Nagaoka), a playwright in pursuit of celibacy. Shiota’s film develops into a playful take on a Japanese sub-genre…
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A young Dale Cooper and Laura Palmer seated in the black lodge, two and a half decades past. It’s the first image we get from Twin Peaks returned and extends a moment of nostalgia before settling how much time has passed, both in Lynch’s universe and ours. When Coop reappears following Angelo Badalamenti’s Twin Peak’s…
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And as the last note from “Love Theme” fades, David Lynch pats Angelo Badalamenti on the back, before leaning closer to whisper, “you are my muse.” Angelo, caressing the hand resting on his back, returns “and you mine.” The two, now with hands clasped, are shrouded by a ring of light, a light that grows…
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After twenty-six years Twin Peaks breathes once more. The series formerly declared dead by director David Lynch, will return following two and a half decades of speculation and fan civil war (born by the closing scene of the final episode – Beyond Life and Death). Its revival beckons the Lynchian cult to raise their lighters…
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The opening moments of Out Of The Shadows are among its best. The first scene, a tracking shot through a murder scene with grievously damaged bodies, an upset detective and an unsettling atmosphere set by the colour grade and sound, promises a clever indie horror that for the most part, the film fails to deliver….
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In ninety-five minutes, The Osiris Child recreates the past twenty years of sci-fi. It’s a fast blend of genre styles new and old, reaching screens in the format of a graphic novel and touching bases with every ‘humanity in crisis’ story ever told. While never profound, The Osiris Child achieves its vision, but the lack of…
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My Entire High School Sinking Into The Sea is a psychedelic trip through four storeys of a floating high school. About as bad of a place as someone would want to take a transcendental journey, but for the main characters it’s an edifying one, filled with colour, strange visuals and awkward relationships. Dash (Jason Schwartzman)…
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After more than thirty years, the amber Mini has once more made the journey from tip to tip in the Land of the Long White Cloud. Pork Pie brings the 1981 New Zealand classic Goodbye Pork Pie into the 21st century, and it returns with more than just the mini. Goodbye Pork Pie played a…
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In 1968 we received Rosemary’s Baby. It was the film that established Roman Polanski’s ability to bring madness onto screen and placed Mia Farrow as the paranoid mother, unknowingly carrying Satan’s spawn through nine months of fear and mental ruin. It was a landmark film, exploring the psyche and anxiety of an expecting mother. In…
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When I was nineteen I spent three straight days without sleeping. I had just moved to Tokyo and couldn’t cope with the light pollution or the sounds from the trains that ran behind my flat. I would spend the nights listening to relaxing music and watch films during the day. On the third morning at…
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If there was one thing Jiro Dreams of Sushi did, it was set a precedent that documentaries can be about literally anything. The evidence is in cable broadcasting and the phenomena of reality TV series. There are entire channels dedicated to reality TV programs, filling endless time slots with narratives on cat trainers or house…
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The first season of Wayward Pines made its premiere with auspicious timing. Aside from recruiting veteran actors Matt Dilon, Juliette Lewis and Toby Jones, or the fact that M. Night Shyamalan had joined as a producer and would direct the series pilot; the show would find its most eager audience in a void that had…
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During the parting moments of 2016, a year already marked by the deaths of so many luminaries and childhood favourites, actress Carrie Fisher suffered a cardiac arrest during a transatlantic flight, causing her death four days later on the 27th of December. Her mother, actress and performer Debbie Reynolds, passed the very next day, reportedly leaving with…
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The Confirmation plays out like a Sherlock Holmes tale set in a scarce stretch of rural America, with weekend dad Walt (Clive Owen) and his precocious son Anthony (Jaeden Lieberher) spending a murky 24 hours chasing down a stolen tool kit. In the directorial debut from Nebraska writer Bob Nelson, the role of Sherlock and…
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Gary Oldman has pulled a DeNiro (Raging Bull) for his latest role in Joe Wright’s The Darkest Hour, emerging unrecognizable. The former Batman and Harry Potter star has appeared in early images of the war-time film looking like a wax replica of Winston Churchill, which given the last time we saw him he was the…
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