Reviews

It feels absolutely wonderful to see a Vietnamese film in this year’s Sydney Film Festival. Of course, there have been many Vietnamese film in film festivals before but, with a stronger focus on genre-centric cinema over the recent year, it feels invigorating for a Vietnamese critic such as myself. This year, we have Ash Mayfair‘s…

There is no question that the late, great Aretha Franklin was the Queen of Soul. But what you may not know is that she was also an accomplished gospel singer; the daughter of a preacher who first developed her musical chops at church. Amazing Grace is a homage to Franklin’s past, a 1972 concert film…

Another day, another music biopic. Well, almost. Continuing the resurgence of cinematic fare concerned with the chaos that is the life of the musician, Her Smell takes inspiration from the 90s rock scene where female singers like Courtney Love, PJ Harvey, and Shirley Manson gave their male counterparts plenty of competition. With a bleached-blonde lead…

Great Britain in the late 1980s. A country in the grip of economic chaos, racial tensions, and political unrest. And a time fashion clearly forgot. It’s a setting and era cinema has covered extensively over the years. With an inviting narrative and a soundtrack filled with 80s pop and rock wonders, Blinded by the Light…

It should come as no surprise that in My Nudity Means Nothing (Ma nudité ne sert à rien) the protagonist is naked. In this case, it is the French, Underground filmmaker, Marina de Van. She holes herself up in her flat and flitters between existential angst and some serious naval gazing. All this and absolutely…

Most documentaries are good at providing observations about a subject. They are often unobtrusive and just like a fly-on-the-wall. But what do you do when you’ve chosen to chronicle an individual who is an illusionist and expert prankster by day? TV director, Ben Berman grapples with this as well as the notion of the truth…

Inspiration can strike at any time. But if you’re an artist like PJ Harvey you may choose to go in search of this illusiveness. A Dog Called Money is a music documentary that depicts the process that spawned the album, The Hope 6 Demolition Project. The result is a beautifully-shot film that can be uneven…

For a movie based on a true story about an elderly British woman revealed to be a long-term spy for the Russians, one headlined by the ever-reliable Judi Dench, Red Joan sadly fails to ignite its potential. Based on a novel inspired by Melita Norwood (dubbed “The Granny Spy”), who was both a British civil…

It has been almost two decades since the X-Men franchise started and now it has finally come to an end. Over the years, we have had a series of generally positive outcomes from this franchise — a list of mostly great films and a handful of very bad ones. For every film like X2: X-Men…

It’s finally here! The Godzilla franchise continues with Godzilla: King of the Monsters! Previous director Gareth Edwards has been replaced by Michael Dougherty, best known for his horror efforts like the Halloween anthology film Trick ‘R Treat and the Christmas movie Krampus. With an all-star cast of acclaimed thespians, rising talents and franchise returnees and free reign…

If you were to see the cast of Triple Threat, which is jam-packed with talented martial artists/established action heroes, chances are that you would be overly excited. With this much talent in an action film, how can it possibly fail? We must consider the people behind the scenes. Triple Threat has director Jesse V. Johnson,…

Only several months after cinema screens were graced with Bohemian Rhapsody and part of the journey of Queen’s meteoric rise to fame. We now have Rocketman, which examines another flamboyant and influential musician, Elton John, and unlike the former, this film decidedly takes a bit more of a leap both stylistically and also narratively. Because…

It’s easy to be cynical about the Disney juggernaut of rolling out live action remakes of their classic animated properties. We’ve already had Dumbo earlier this year which was watchable but felt like a little misstep by Tim Burton. Next comes Aladdin, which along with The Lion King releasing July 17 will be the 1-2…

When one brings up the word “survival” in cinematic terms, usually some would think adventure stories in foreign environments like tropical islands, forests or jungles. Others would think of contained thrillers, where stories would be set in one small setting like a hostage situation in a building ala Die Hard, Under Siege or Speed. But…

It’s fair to say that most people know Shakespeare and his plays. But, very little is known about the old Bard himself. All Is True is a bio-pic about ye olde William i.e. the writer in his twilight years. The result is a story that relies on some speculation and doesn’t always live up to…

After several release date pushbacks and a title change (its working title was Nasty Women, a now outdated reference to one of Donald Trump’s many insults thrown at Hillary Clinton), The Hustle finally plods into cinemas this week. A female-centric remake of 1988’s Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (which was itself a remake of 1964’s Bedtime Story), the film attempts…

Video games have generally had a fairly bad run when it comes to movie adaptations. Either they veer too far away from their source material and lose their gamer fans, or they lean too far into it and go over the heads of mainstream audiences. So when it was announced that they were making a…

All romantic comedies require some suspension of disbelief from an audience. These films often exist in a world of hyper-reality where two polar opposite characters somehow fall madly in love with each other. When a studio offers up something like Long Shot, a romantic comedy starring Charlize Theron and Seth Rogen, it’s hard not to raise…

It’s been twenty-five years since Australian cinema produced a top quality romantic comedy. Over two decades after Muriel’s Wedding, our local film industry has barely touched the genre, let alone delivered a film worthy of rivalling anything America or the UK can dish up. How wonderfully refreshing it is to see something like Top End Wedding…

Thunder Road opens with one of the more profound opening scenes in recent memory. Police officer Jim is giving a eulogy at his mother’s funeral somewhere in the American heartland. He’s completely unprepared and grief-stricken and – in one 12-minute shot – flips from humourous nostalgia to all out hysterics, finishing the awkward performance with…

It’s all been leading up to this, 11 years and more than 21 movies and it’s time for the Marvel Cinematic Universe to provide a conclusion to the Avengers saga and some of its Phase One heroes. The ones who ushered in a renaissance and resurgence of comic book superhero movies. Whodathunk that back in…

Just one week after the superhero genre gave us a Big-style blockbuster with Shazam!, we’re being offered up a by-the-numbers reverse version. Taking inspiration from the Tom Hanks classic, Little flips the age transformation and genre of its protagonist, which, for better or worse, is mildly refreshing.  By all accounts, this was the brainchild of young…

One only needs to look at the poster art for James Kent‘s postwar-set romance The Aftermath to gage the triangle of transgression that will unfold over the course of the film’s 108 minute running time.  In fact, the surface level of the Joe Shrapnel/Anna Waterhouse-penned script practically begs you to accept the predictable turn of events,…

“And now…after 25 years in the making…and unmaking” So says the wry on-screen text preceding Terry Gilliam‘s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, a near-three decade trek for the eccentric filmmaker whose hope of bringing his off-kilter adventure-comedy to fruition has languished in development hell since its beginnings in 1989. Once intended to be a…

It’s been a rocky road for the DC Extended Universe. From the dizzying delights of Wonder Woman to the hyper-colour mess of Suicide Squad. From the delicious ridiculousness of Aquaman to the dark and sloppy disaster of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. And it’s hard to forget what should have been their crowning glory…

The year is 1944. Leyna (Amandla Stenberg), the teenage daughter of a white German factory worker (Abbie Cornish) and a black Senegalese soldier, is dubbed a “Rhineland bastard” and flees for Berlin, hoping to find anonymity and safety in the larger city. But, after she is kicked out of school and is forced to falsify…

2019 is going to be a fairly big slate for the House of Mouse with not one but four “live action adaptations” of their intellectual property hitting cinema screens. The first one out of the gate is the film about a baby elephant with overly large ears who can fly. Originally Dumbo was based on…

Based on a true story (well-documented in the Channel 4 documentary The Wrestlers: Fighting with My Family), born into a tight-knit wrestling family, Paige (Florence Pugh) and her brother Zak (Jack Lowden) are ecstatic when they get the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to try out for the WWE. But when only Paige earns a spot in the…

If Love, Actually had a child with Around the World in Eighty Days, The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir would be that child. It throws its trickster and street magician protagonist Aja (Dhanush) into a chain of unexpected adventures. He meets a diverse group of people from a celebrity to mobster-like big guys to a swindling cab…

Adapting tragic events of the world to the cinema screen can be a very risky proposition. There are many ways to get it wrong and very few ways to get it right. The wrong ways can lead the film to be considered exploitative, cheap, insulting, xenophobic and even laughable. It would also depend on the…