After falling into 2nd place on the box office ladder, The Secret Life of Pets is back on top again, making $3.41 million this week. It also earned the the weekend’s best screen average with $6,987 from its 489 screens, and, with school holidays now upon this, this film should continue to perform well. Bridget Jones’s Baby, earning $2.81 million this…
John Sturges’ 1960 American Western has been polished and updated with a culturally diverse – for the sake of being culturally diverse – cast and a keen eye on box office glory. Antoine Fuqua’s updated version of The Magnificent Seven is a successful outing in this sense, roping in the likes of a sullen Denzel…
The new biopic Snowden – in cinemas today – is a film about one of the world’s most famous political dissidents, Edward Snowden (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt), by a filmmaker (Oliver Stone) who is celebrated for his political dissidence. It should be a match made in cinematic heaven. So why isn’t it? The problems with…
In its first full week of release, Bridget Jones’s Baby has nabbed top spot, claiming $3.68 million at the box office. Only just beating the film at no. 2, the Renee Zellweger flick has also reportedly yielded the lowest screen average (that is, the average amount earned across the number of screens/venues a movie is shown) for a new release at the top…
It’s probably impossible for any film or documentary that covers The Beatles to ever be disappointing. It’s also challenging for any to shed light on an interesting aspect of the band that may not have been covered before. Director Ron Howard opts to focus this project on a particularly hectic and whirlwind time in the…
Fans of Bridget Jones and those feeling nostalgic over 90s-early 2000s rom-coms won’t be disappointed by Bridget Jones’s Baby. The film follows Bridget (Renee Zellweger), now in her 40s, who’s back in square one. Single and bitter about it, but she tries to move on and parties. This leads to chance steamy encounters with a…
For the second week in a row, The Secret Life of Pets, voiced by Louis C.K., Eric Stonestreet and Kevin Hart, has taken the top spot at the box ladder, bringing in $4.80 million this week. With a total box office earnings of $7.38 million since its premiere, it’s the best fortnight result since the first two weekends of Suicide Squad. ….
If there is a film that you can think of the top of your head that had the best marketing strategy, many would say that it would be The Blair Witch Project. With the perfect timing of the internet and it matter-of-fact documentary film-making, it became the trailblazer of the modern viral marketing campaign. So many around the world, including…
Do you remember the 1977 Disney film Pete’s Dragon? No? Good, neither do most. But Disney’s new string of live action remakes is now having a crack at the original – which has become something of a cult favourite in the Disney archives – in an attempt to replicate their success with The Jungle Book…
Directed by Roberto Andò, The Confessions (Le confessioni) is a refreshing suspense thriller. The film centres on a global summit where the world’s powerful and influential leaders attend. Among them is Salus (Toni Servillo), a monk, who is called over by Director of International Monetary Funds Daniel Roché (Daniel Auteuil) so he could make a…
Italy’s answer to The Perks of Being a Wallflower, One Kiss (Un Bacio, directed by Ivan Cotroneo) centres on gay and proud Lorenzo (Rimau Grillo Ritzberger), Blu (Valentina Romani), who is shadowed by a traumatic past, and bullied basketball player Antonio (Leonardo Pazzagli). Their shared outsider status at school draws them together. But their friendship…
Tom Hanks, what can we say about Tom Hanks? Quite frankly, it’s hard to say anything bad at all. Despite the rare lacklustre movie, this man just cannot seem to steer anything in the wrong direction. And Sully, out now in Australian cinemas, proves no different, with the venerable actor steering both a movie and…
Yesterday, an ambitious new Australian film premiered on streaming service Stan. Helmed by Stuart Willis, Restoration is the latest in a long line of original Australian sci-fi features to find itself an audience. Think modern classics like Dark City and more recent releases like Predestination – though they describe the film here as being inspired by Twilight Zone,…
Now I admit I don’t really watch a lot of documentaries, but in recent years I have gotten myself into a good groove when I discovered the work of documentary filmmaker, Louis Theroux. The first documentary I saw of his was The Most Hated Family in America, which was about people in the Westboro Baptist…
One of the first thing that Blood Father makes clear is that John Link (Mel Gibson) is over being a flashy action hero type. It’s old hat to an ex-con like him and he doesn’t want anything to do with it. However, don’t be fooled, Gibson himself seems to be having a hell of a…
Fede Alvarez surprised horror fans in 2013 when he tackled a remake of Evil Dead in a way that was satisfying and consistent with the classic blood-soaked series. This time around the Uruguayan director is trying his hand at something much different, a sharp original home-invasion thriller titled Don’t Breathe about three delinquent burglars who…
Looks like Suicide Squad has finally been knocked off its number one perch by Bad Moms, after dominating the box office across the first three weeks of its release. Having coasted at number two for a fortnight, Moms did an impressive $1.99 million this week to move into the top spot, possibly due to the weekend being the third…
Despite a strong (albeit utterly unhinged) performance from Kevin Costner, Criminal‘s convoluted and underdeveloped plot make for what can only be described as an incredibly boring, yet more importantly, disappointing film to watch. Best known for his mildly received 2012 biographical crime thriller The Iceman, Ariel Vroman’s Criminal sees Kevin Costner star as Jericho Stewart, an…
The iconic character David Brent, last seen 15 years ago in the BBC series The Office, has returned in the year’s anticipated – and highly awkward – film David Brent: Life on the Road, which is released in cinemas today. The film sees star, writer and producer Ricky Gervais return as the character who kickstarted his…
No one asked for the remake of arguably the biggest Hollywood epic of all time. And yet, for some obscure ($) reason, the universe decided the 1959 classic Ben-Hur must be done again. And this time, it has Morgan Freeman in dreadlocks. We all know the story. Judah Ben-Hur (Jack Huston) is a wealthy Jewish…
So if you’re over superhero films, Will Smith, Margot Robbie and Jared Leto, you will not be happy to hear that Suicide Squad remains top of the Box Office ladder this week, its third week in no. 1 since its premiere week. The DC Comics’ supervillains remain in top spot with AU$3.18 million made this week, followed by Bad Moms, having…
Gary Ross’ Civil War drama Free State of Jones recounts one of the most interesting, albeit lesser-known, tales from the 1860s and 70s in Mississippi. Matthew McConaughey’s Newton Knight, disillusioned with the Confederate forces, deserts the war and builds himself a ragtag army comprised of poor farmers and runaway slaves, bent on fighting back against…
Believe it or not, this isn’t a film about Simone Biles latent fifth gold medal that became a bronze. Aside from the scenes of gymnastics, this film is about as far from the grace of the American superstar as any film could possibly be, but unabashedly so. The Bronze is what happens when The Big…
Pain and Gain. The Wolf of Wall Street. Scarface. What do these films have in common? The characters are all on a quest to achieve their own versions of the American Dream. They are all about greed and the seduction of power that shows that absolute power corrupts absolutely. But what makes the first two…
If all was right in the highly politicised world of award shows, Logan Lerman would be looking at a good upcoming season, seeing as his performance as Marcus Messner in James Schamus’ Indignation will be almost impossible to overlook. The Cold War-era film is an adaptation of Philip Roth’s period novel of the same name,…
Green Room is one of those movies that isn’t at all hesitant about sneaking up on you and showing you exactly what you’re in for, be it through taboo subject matter (white supremacy) ultra violence or a range of truly sadistic characters. And once you accept what your next hour and half is going to…
Mixed reviews and Jared Leto critiques be gone, because Suicide Squad remains firmly in first place on the Australian Box Office report. Whilst it didn’t do as well in its second week against its unbelievable performance in its opening week (where it earned AU $13,904,557), its takings of AU$5.9 million mean that it’s stronger than Jason Bourne’s second week on…
Laika Studios is an animation studio that is yet to become a household name. I honestly didn’t know them before hearing about their latest film, Kubo and the Two Strings. Though, without knowing it, I had already enjoyed their first studio film, Coraline, immensely. And reading about their other works like The Boxtrolls and Paranorman,…
Blake Lively finds herself in her own little Castaway-slash-All Is Lost-slash-Life of Pi type role with The Shallows, Director Jaume Collet-Serra placing a lot of faith in the young actress, who to this point is best known for her role on Gossip Girl. The purpose is to basically place Lively’s character, Nancy, as an injured…
Seemingly about the fun, bizarre world of an adult sub-culture called ‘Competitive Endurance Tickling’, comes a documentary that takes fast steps sideways, trips down some steep, morbidly dark stairs and leads viewers into the world of abuse, identity theft and cyber bullying. Like so many great documentaries before it, you walk away from Tickled wanting…
