Film

The Electronic Music Conference kicks off in Sydney next month, and as part of its evening program – EMCPlay – will be a screening of the documentary on Mo’Wax and UNKLE founder James Lavelle, The Man From Mo’Wax. Paris Pompor from Groovescooter is curating the film program of the festival, which will screen at the Surry Hills…

Sydneysiders can look forward to Australian Exclusive season of the searing, suspenseful new release First Reformed, from the director of the iconic Taxi Driver, Paul Schrader. Set to hit Golden Age Cinema from 8th November, the film stars Ethan Hawke (Dead Poets Society, Predestination, The Purge), and Amanda Seyfried (Mean Girls, Mamma Mia!, In Time), and since its premiere at the Venice…

What goes on tour stays on tour. Except if you’re the Scottish artists who feature in Lost in France. This music documentary is a boozy and breezy look back at a once-forgotten, 1997 Brittany tour. The artists reunite again in 2015 and in doing so, prove that some things – like friendship – never change….

Groucho Marx once said he wouldn’t want to belong to a club that would have him as a member. For us mere mortals, the world’s most famous nightclub remains elusive territory. It only existed for 33 months and if you were lucky enough to be there, chances are the velvet rope held you back. Studio…

Try to imagine something that could be your biggest joy and greatest nightmare. It’s not easy. But finding out you have an identical twin sibling has got to be up there. The Twinning Reaction is a documentary that covers a bizarre and bittersweet example of this with brutal honesty. The results are not what you’d…

Acting as a nice alternative to the brutality of Halloween, Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween, whilst not overly clever or necessary viewing by any means, provides enough chaotic entertainment for the younger crowd (or those young at heart) to earn their own respective scares for the spooky season. Even though its title suggests its a sequel…

As Australia prepares to feel the sharp blade of Michael Myers puncture once again with the release of Halloween, the film’s heroine – and original genre scream queen – Jamie Lee Curtis took to our shores to spread the love of all things Laurie Strode and this four-decade long series.  Gracefully walking the black carpet…

Australian Music Week Film Festival presents a diverse lineup of film premieres, set to grace the event on 10-11 November. Already announced, films range from discussing the politics of music to sharing the uniqueness of Melbourne’s music scene. Today, the 13th and final film was announced, Turn it Up! Finding Sydney’s Sound, which discussed the city’s…

The AU’s Harris Dang sat down with Blumhouse’s Jason Blum to talk about his latest production, Halloween, which hits cinemas today. They talk about the great response the film has had so far, the weight of working with heavyweights like Jamie Lee Curtis and John Carpenter – not to mention the franchise itself. Blum also…

Trick: The 2018 incarnation of Halloween acts as a direct continuation of the 1978 original, essentially wiping out all seven sequels (and the two Rob Zombie-helmed revisions) that succeeded in the years since. Treat: It’s good.  Like really f***ing good! After surviving the maniacal clutches of psychotic killer Michael Myers forty years prior, Laurie Strode…

In cinemas this Thursday, and following on from a record breaking weekend on the US Box Office, legendary actress Jamie Lee Curtis walked the black carpet in Sydney last night for the Australian premiere of Halloween. Nathan Atkins was there and brings us these photos from the carpet.

This Summer, Stan will introduce us to another new, and original series. From creator, writer and Executive Producer Glen Dolman, comes mystery drama series Bloom. The series takes place in an idyllic country town, one year after a devastating flood kills five of their local residents, where a mysterious new plant with the power to restore their…

We always hurt the ones we love the most. This is certainly the case with Beautiful Boy. The film is an emotional drama about a father who is grappling with his son’s drug addiction. It’s a very human and poignant story. This film is the English language debut for director, Felix Van Groeningen. The plot…

Lady Gaga is not the first singer to embark on the transition from music to film (J. Lo, I’m looking at you), and I doubt she will be the last. However, never before have I seen a musician take this leap with such skill, such talent and such raw emotion reminiscent of a seasoned actor….

No matter how Hollywood tries to sell it, remake will always be a word deemed blasphemous to cinephiles the world over.  Sure, they can throw out terms such as reboot or reimagining or revisioning, but regardless of the spin, they all refer to the same type of picture.  And because it’s one we have experienced…

Earlier this year the latest Lucasfilm epic, Solo: A Star Wars Story hit the theatres around the world, and is now available on DVD and Blu-Ray. Academy Award-winning director, Ron Howard put a story into place about the beloved heroes Han Solo and Chewbacca. Packed with star-studded cast, and plenty of mind-blowing visual effects, the…

After an already incredible and diverse music program, this year’s Darebin Music Feast introduces you to its first venture into cinema with Feast Films. Partnered with Thornbury Picture House, Feast Films is screening feature and documentary films in Melbourne on the theme of gender and the music industry, following the extraordinary lives and careers of…

Eighteen years ago we were introduced to Unbreakable, the superhero film that was not all it seemed. Two years ago, sixteen years after the original made its debut, the sequel Split came to our screens with a twist ending we never expected. Now, from the unbreakable original, to the tension splitting sequel, comes the next instalment…

Director Russell Mulcahy, the Melbourne filmmaker whose career has seen him graduate from Elton John music videos to varied levels of cinematic quality (the 1984 wild boar in the outback horror flick Razorback, the ill-advised Kim Basinger vehicle The Real McCoy, and the Geoffrey Rush drama Swimming Upstream just a few of his efforts) is…

When one praises a film, one of the many positives that one would say is that the storytelling is incredibly immersive from a visual perspective. Films with such praise would include Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, J.J Abrams’ Star Trek Into Darkness and Francis Lawrence’s The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. But what all those films mentioned have…

Of Fathers & Sons should come with a warning. This is likely to induce nightmares even though it’s not strictly a horror film. It is however, a horrifying documentary that chronicles a religious zealot and his young, jihadist-in-the-making sons. The result is a visceral and eye-opening look at this largely-unknown world. Filmmaker, Talal Derki is…

There’s no shortage of documentaries on Netflix – both in feature and episodic format. Here’s just five documentary features you need to add to your playlists: Blackfish https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OEjYquyjcg Blackfish is a documentary about the captivity of orca whales, where it investigates the psychological and physical torment these sea animals go through in the name of…

It seems almost baffling that Neil Armstrong’s account of being the first man on the moon hasn’t been told prior to Damien Chazelle‘s First Man.  Clearly an intimidating figure but still reserved, sensitive and aloof enough to not be placed upon a pedestal as some flawless being, Chazelle’s film seeks to uncover the more human…

From the new Elton John biopic, to Wizards and an unrecognisable Christian Bale, here are six just released movie trailers you need to watch… Fantastic Beasts: Crimes of Grindelwald One more addition to the beloved Harry Potter franchise, Crimes of Grindelwald is the second film in a new series of five, written exclusively for the screen…

Set in Europe “20,000 years ago”, a tribe of hunter-gatherers is preparing to hunt before winter. Keda (Kodi Smit-McPhee), is learning the ropes from his father, the tribe’s chief Tau (Johannes Haukur Johannesson). Quiet and sensitive, the young Keda is having issues in coming to terms with killing animals, with father gently guiding him unto…

Earlier this year, we sat down with Hyun Lee, the director of a short film called Asian Girls which screened at SXSW in Austin, Texas and then at the Sydney Film Festival. We talked about the making of the film, working with Rainbow Chan, and the benefits and importance of diversity in film funding. It’s…

Earlier this year while he was here for Sydney Film Festival – and not long after I had the chance to see the film at SXSW – I sat down with director Bart Layton to talk about his new film American Animals, which is in cinemas next Thursday. Based on a true story that happened at…

American Animals is the scripted film debut from writer/director Bart Layton, who walked away with a BAFTA for his debut effort, the documentary The Imposter. Knowing he comes from a documentary background is unsurprising when you see this film, which screened at Sundance earlier this year to a good deal of critical acclaim, and continued…

I’m going to preface this review by saying, I’m not a comics person, I just enjoy comic-adaptation movies. So my reviews tend to have this film-centric lens rather than delving into how aspects of specific comic editions or stories can be seen threaded through the movie. So now that I’ve gotten that out of the…

Thanks to Cowlick Entertainment, we have 10 Double Passes to give away to Harmony, part one of the “Five Frequencies Saga” and the final work of Jessica Falkholt, the Home and Away star who we tragically lost in a car crash late last year. Harmony chronicles the story of Harmony, a super-empath born with the…