Film

The documentary, Killswitch makes some interesting points in support of whistle-blowers and hacktivists like Aaron Swartz and Edward Snowden. That is that their only real crime is that they’ve out-smarted you. Killswitch is an unoriginal but interesting film about the battleground that is the Internet, which describes how our rights to free speech and privacy…

Where do you draw the line between fantasy and reality? When does thinking about committing a crime become a crime? Can we be convicted just because our Google searches were for suspicious or potentially dangerous things? These are just some of the questions posed by the chilling documentary titled Thought Crimes: The Case of the…

It’s been a slow few weeks at the box office. Despite a slew of new releases, none have really made a huge impact and its been 6 weeks since anything has broken $4 million. Enter Straight Outta Compton, F. Gary Gray’s highly anticipated biopic on prolific hip-hop group N.W.A.. The Hip-Hop drama had a $60 million opening…

Peace Officer is one scary film and it’s not even a horror movie. This documentary is a timely and important one about the militarisation of police in the United States. It’s a fascinating, informative and balanced look at a complex subject and one that manages to hit all of the right notes. The story focuses…

Japanese Film Festival Classics program returns to 2015 with an array of the best Japanese films selected from the works of renowned filmmaker, Kon Ichikawa. This tribute highlights Ichikawa significance in moulding the style of 20th Century Japanese films. All screenings are free and are to be held in the Domain Theatre, featuring a total…

A deeply emotional and captivating film, Mia Madre (My Mother) stands as what is bound to be one of the many beautifully told Italian films on offer for the Lavazza Italian Film Festival. Having won awards from the likes of the Cannes Film Festival 2015 (Prize of the Ecumenical Jury), and being directed by Nanni…

The title of this film doesn’t really give much of an insight into its narrative and in fact, the word “life” has a bit of a double entendre. It couples as both the act of existing as well as the name of the publication that one of our leads works for. Not so surprisingly though,…

In a small town in America’s Bible belt, Christianity and tradition reign supreme. For the past 88 years a community in the Holy City of the Wichitas have staged an Easter passion play/pageant that once saw audiences number the tens of thousands. Jesus Town USA is a documentary that is warm and sweet-enough but can…

Kill Me Three Times is a black comedy/thriller that sees professional assassin Charlie Wolfe (Simon Pegg) tangled up in a web of deception tying together the rural lives of a dentist (Sullivan Stapleton), a bartender (Callan Mulvey) and his lover (Alice Braga) in Western Australia. Unfortunately, despite the messy fun of this premise and the…

Pixels is not your usual alien invasion fare type film. It’s also not your usual Adam Sandler type film. And it’s also not your usual family type film either. You would think that being unusual would work in its favour but sadly it doesn’t. What this film does have is some funny moments, some really…

Call Me Lucky is a fascinating and compelling portrait of one of the most memorable and significant voices in comedy that you’ve never heard of. However, once you hear Barry Crimmins declaration – “I’d like to overthrow the government of the United States, and I’d like to close the Catholic Church” – it’s hard to…

A couple of new films have changed the box office landscape this week but the two from last week are back at it again, fighting for top spot. Southpaw has usurped number 1, earning $1.3 million last week. Although it is only in its second week in Australia (as opposed to its 7th in The States)…

N.W.A have, is, and always will be integral to hip hop and it’s status as one of the most unique, and accessible, forms of self-expression in music. Birthed in the excessively rough neighbourhood of Compton, California, the group became a reference point for hip hop as a channel through which youth can make sense of…

Given my past experiences with the horrific disease, I’m one person that finds the deus ex machina of cancer unbearable. It is often done tastelessly, depicting it’s sufferers as people without autonomy or regarded with the self-respect that they deserve – cancer patients are people, not pawns that should be used to explain a protagonist…

In the mid-90’s, Timothy Conigrave published his bestselling memoir, titled Holding the Man, 10 days before his death. It was a story so intimate and full of warmth that it continued to resonate with Australian audiences over the years. Tommy Murphy adapated it into an award-winning stage production in 2006, and now Director Neil Armfield…

Usually when imagining a career in rock n’ roll and a band called “Ricki And The Flash” you wouldn’t imagine it to involve a handful of old timers in a shabby Californian bar with a 60 something year old lead lady whose only ever record produced is stored in her ex-husband’s rubbermaid. And yet, this…

Given that at some point everything that is old becomes new again, it makes sense that the National Lampoon Vacation series would be on the reboot agenda. A surprisingly durable series that has spanned over three decades, the latest in line acts as a semi-reboot-come-sequel with enough sly nods to pay tribute to the original without…

Joel Edgerton has already proved himself indispensable to Australian cinema, particularly with Animal Kingdom and The Rover, both films with an atmosphere and scope much larger than The Gift. For his directorial debut, Edgerton, who plays Gordon “Gordo” Moseley, brings a much more insular focus in both character and environment and it helps him deliver…

Hollywood hasn’t had the greatest track record when it comes to translating video games into films. There’s been but a handful that have been worth watching, the Resident Evil series, Lara Croft Tomb Raider and cult classic Mortal Kombat all rank amongst the good ones. With Hitman: Agent 47 this is actually a reboot and…

“Oh look it’s a boxing movie, cinema hasn’t seen that before,” is a cynical thought that would have gone through most minds when Southpaw was first announced. Having it directed by Antoine Fuqua, who brought us Training Day and The Equalizer, and written by Kurt Sutter, a man who worked extensively on Sons of Anarchy…

Woody Allen is quite possibly the only living director who could make a dark comedy film about a perfect crime. Heck, he has kind of already done that with his previous film, Crimes & Misdemeanours. But in 2015 Irrational Man is a wry, tongue-in-cheek story about an older professor’s relationship with a younger woman. Sound…

I said it on Twitter and I will say it again here- I have never been so unprepared for a film’s plot progression in my life as I was for My Ordinary Love Story. It was unexpected and completely masterful. The story follows a slightly outspoken Eun-Jin (Gang Ye-Won), who introduces us one by one…

There’s a worrying future for those of us in Australia’s largest cities: unless you already own a house or two, the rest of us are not going to make it in the property ownership game.  So we stress and stew about the fact that although we’re going to have to work till we’re 70 years…

She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry is a little documentary with a big, important message. It chronicles the second wave of feminism in the United States from 1966-1971. It was a tumultuous time that saw some radical changes. This film is an illuminating one that tackles one key part of a complex social movement. This documentary…

Alexander Dunn’s expositional documentary 808 takes its name from the Roland TR-808, one of the first programmable drum machines. Originally manufactured in early 1980 for studio musicians to record demos, the 808 was criticized for its unrealistic drum sound and was likened to the sound of marching ants. However, the snappy, tinny sound of the…

You’d not be wrong in thinking that 2015 could be the year of the spy movie, with Kingsman: The Secret Service, Spy, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation having all been released already and Spectre due later in the year. We also have another contender in the genre, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. With a ridiculously attractive…

Amy (Amy Schumer) is a writer for a men’s magazine, along with her friend Nikki (Vanessa Bayer). One morning, they sit in adjacent cubicles of their office bathroom, comparing Johnny Depp(s) from different films based on their fuckability. They aim for the funniest answers, such as: Edward Scissorhands (1990) because you’d always have a great…

Who can it be now? The documentary, Colin Hay: Waiting For My Life To Begin is about the affable Men At Work front man-turned-solo troubadour who is now known for his appearances on the TV show, Scrubs. The film is a fascinating and honest one that is a little in-cohesive at times but still manages to…

We open in San Francisco in 1976. Minnie Goetz (Bel Powley) has just had sex for the first time. With Monroe (Alexander Skarsgård), her mother’s (Kistin Wiig) boyfriend. Based on Goets’ graphic novel memoir of the same name, The Diary of a Teenage Girl charts a dark and disturbing journey of a young woman, going…

Mississippi Grind commences with a fixed camera shot of a pastoral landscape, a glorious rainbow stretches across the horizon in the background. Yet, when Ben Mendelsohn’s Gerry remarks on the spectacle with wonder around a local casino poker table later that evening, he is seemingly the only player to have witnessed it. At least, he…