Film

Sicario resembles Donald Trump’s big problem with the Mexican border, and renders his wall solution useless. For her part, FBI agent Kate (Emily Blunt) is kicking down doors from minute one. Just as quickly, she realises that is not fixing anything. So when Matt (Josh Brolin in a Mark Zuckerberg outfit) offers her some real…

San Andreas is a fault line that extends through a large majority of California and is overdue for a BIG earthquake. “It’s not a matter of if but when” is the premonition that Lawrence (Paul Giamatti) a professor of seismology gives his class at Caltech, and after years of research into the prediction of earthquakes,…

Sometimes described as a loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear, Empire is a drama series that follows the power struggle that ensues when gangster turned hip-hop mogul Lucious Lyons (Terrence Howard) is diagnosed with ALS. Faced with only a few months left before the disease kills him, Lucious pits his children against each other in…

When the red band trailer for Dude Bro Party Massacre III was first released it struck me, and it struck me extremely hard; I hadn’t laughed that loudly since my eighteenth re-watch of Tommy Wiseau’s The Room. Perhaps it isn’t a coincidence then, that Mark from the classic 2003 “disasterpiece” (AKA Greg Sestero) is in…

Staring music and spoken word legend Henry Rollins, He Never Died is exactly the kind of Grindhouse trash you want to see at an underground film festival. It’s like reading a comic book that was self published in the days where that meant a photocopier and a guillotine. There’s something old school about this whole…

M. Night Shyamalan has copped a lot of criticism in the previous years, some of it warranted, but most of it an overreaction to his missteps. Granted, The Last Airbender, After Earth, and Lady in the Water were particularly bad movies, right alongside the laughable The Happening which was even trashed by it’s lead actor…

While nowhere near the numbers that Furious 7 and Jurassic World drew in, Universal’s impeccable year continues with Everest debuting at number one in Australia. earning itself $3.2 million over the weekend, Also in its first week in The U.S, it made a solid $7.2 million.

Infinitely Polar Bear was both written and directed by Maya Forbes. She seems to have a talent for speaking through children. Her track record of childhood perception is both entertaining and frustrating. Frustrating because sometimes it’s too right and sometimes it’s too simple. There’s nostalgia to this film. Set in the late 70s, the aesthetic…

Cut Snake is not your average crime thriller, it also explores the deeper and darker mysteries of understanding ourselves and sharing our secrets with the people we love. The complexity of life and love and how it’s not a simple case of black and white, and how the lives of three people become changed forever….

In this origin story but not quite an adaptation of the beloved J.M Barrie book Peter Pan this film takes us on a journey that seems to have no real rhyme or reason other than Peter trying to find his mother, accidentally stumbling into an adventure and ultimately discovering his destiny. Peter (Levi Miller), a…

There is a moment in Heaven Knows What when a mobile phone is thrown up into the night sky and a surreal sparkle of fireworks cracks and fizzles from the point at which the phone disappears. This is the only moment of beauty and relief that the film offers. The rest of the time, it’s…

Director Takashi Miike is a workaholic, with 98 credits to his name on IMDb since 1991. A genre master, he has a devoted fan base; a group to which I admit I don’t belong, not because I’m not a fan, but simply because I’ve only seen one other of his films, Ace Attorney (2012), which…

Gaspar Noé has proven himself an imaginative auteur, highly capable of and fiercely loyal to surreal, experimental cinema. He shocked with the unforgettable Irreversible and warped minds with the visually satisfying Enter the Void – undoubtedly his two most famous works – but now he seeks to add a more tender, sentimental touch with Love….

Euphemia “Effie” Gray was once a woman stuck between a rock and a hard place. This free-spirited, Scottish lady was living in Victorian times and was trapped in a loveless and sexless marriage to a renowned art critic named John Ruskin. Divorce was not an option for Gray but despite this, she managed to find…

Oh the movie Barely Lethal could have been had it been in the hands of the right people.  There’s a neat little premise here, even a hint of charming self-awareness, but sadly director Kyle Newman and screenwriter John D’Arco have ignored the multitude of opportunities presented to them and ultimately made just another high school comedy…

Straight Outta Compton’s time at the top was short lived after Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials opening last week, but the N.W.A biopic is still going strong. Indeed, The sequel to last years Maze Runner has fared slightly better in Australia in its opening weekend. It made $3.5 million, just beating out its predecessor which…

There are some movies that you need to see on a big screen, that their scale can’t be contained or properly appreciated on a small screen or even on your own home theatre system. Everest is one of those films because it can take your breath away with how visually stunning it is. But the…

The illegitimate child of an alcoholic mother and an absent father preoccupied with his pre-existing family, youngster Stet (Garrett Wareing) spends most of his time in detention, acting out. However, he has tremendous musical talent, in which Ms. Steel (Debra Winger) recognises, and organises for him to audition for the ‘Boychoir’, fronted by the great…

It would be hard to deny Unfriended as an imaginative and innovative film; Director Levan Gabriadze takes an initially uninspiring concept and makes it work with admirable attention to detail and a genuine sense of tension. However, in the film’s pursuit of as much realism as possible, the viewer is left unable to escape from…

In the early 1960’s a movement was beginning to grow amongst the African-Americans in the United States. It began in the south led by Martin Luther King Jr with a pacifist push but soon a group emerged in the west coastal city of Oakland (near San Francisco), founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale came…

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…