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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Night School is a film with a very well-worn premise that has been done many times before (Billy Madison and Old School to name a few), but there factors here that could make the film transcend my meagre expectations. One is the paring of Kevin Hart and Tiffany Haddish, two of the biggest comedy stars right…
It may not seem like it, but it’s been ten years since director Gus Van Sant gave us the powerful and Oscar-winning biopic Milk. Since then, the filmmaker has been in somewhat of a slump, with three films (Restless, Promised Land, and The Sea of Trees) falling flat on their faces. You probably didn’t see any of them and you…
At this very moment, there are 6.5 million Americans living with an intellectual disability. Only 15% of adults are gainfully employed with nearly 1 in 3 living below the poverty line. Their access to a proper education during their youth may provide a clue to these damning statistics. 17% of students with an intellectual disability are…
When you mix up Harry Potter with Goosebumps you end up with The House With A Clock In Its Walls. A film that combines magic with a haunted house and the tried and true need for our young hero to find his courage and rise up to save the day. When orphaned 10 year old…
Johnny English Strikes Again is the third film in this popular franchise. This latest spy spoof follows its predecessors in once again offering audiences a funny romp with an unlikely secret agent. There are predictable scrapes and outrageous hijinks but one thing’s for certain, you are in for a fun ride. David Kerr directs this…
Ladies in Black could have been named “Shopgirl”, but that title was already taken. The film, set over the summer of 1959 in a Department store like David Jones, is a gentle story about some Australian women who are standing on the precipice of change; but often feels like the entrée before the main. This…
It goes without saying that Paul Walker was blessed with the type of face destined to be in front of the camera. And as much as this dedicated documentary, I Am Paul Walker, celebrates his Californian-blessed aesthetics, it seeks more so to highlight that behind the tanned skin, sun-kissed blonde curls and baby blue eyes…
If there’s one director that needs a true change of pace out there, it’s comedy director Paul Feig. He started off great making a successful string of comedies, starting from the romantic-comedy hit Bridesmaids to the buddy cop-comedy The Heat and the espionage-action comedy Spy. Then he hit a big of a snag with his…
According to a book by renowned author Christopher Booker, there are seven different plots in stories, which are: Overcoming the Monster Rags to Riches The Quest Voyage and Return Rebirth Comedy Tragedy And since we have so many stories that essentially are encapsulated in one of these plots, what would make a story stand out…
It is quite amusing to think that we have many films released over the years, regardless of genre, that span across many imaginative worlds, planets, fantasy settings and so on. With the vast amount of superhero films and blockbusters, it’s hard not to see why. But, the world that has not been mined more than enough,…
It can be hard watching characters who you’ve grown up with and have a long standing nostalgic attachment to, get brought back to life on the big screen. There’s something deeply rooted in the warmth of how you remember them, and how sometimes the new version doesn’t quite stand up to that test. The trailer…
There are children’s animated movies made exclusively for kids, which generally lead to a rather torturous experience for parents and caretakers alike (I’m looking at you, Hotel Transylvania 3). Then there is something deceptively ingenious and utterly delightful as Teen Titans GO! To the Movies, which successfully entertains both young and old, whilst also offering up a…
The Conjuring universe began five years ago, spurred by James Wan who had successfully delivered one of the great ghost stories of the 21st century. It was a box office darling, as was every sequel and spin-off that came after, with only the first Annabelle (terrible by every standard) failing to meet the franchise’s critical…
Although The Miseducation of Cameron Post‘s 1993 setting may have people believe that the gay conversion camps at the film’s centre are a thing of the past, and therefore easy to mock as a symbol of how backwards society’s thoughts on therapy was, this treatment is still sadly legal in a large number of American…
Australian cinema has produced some of the finest comedy the screen has ever seen. But the romantic comedy genre is not a territory we Aussies explore particularly well. For every groundbreaking example like last year’s sublime Ali’s Wedding, there’s something as generically safe as The Flip Side, the debut feature film from producer-turned-writer/director Marion Pilowsky. There’s nothing…
Oh, look! We have another Berg-er joint coming in cinemas! Mile 22 is the fourth collaboration between actor Mark Wahlberg and director Peter Berg after the three dramatic films that were based on true stories i.e. the biographical war drama Lone Survivor, the disaster film Deepwater Horizon and the crime drama Patriots Day. All of…
A film like Crazy Rich Asians is a long time coming. For the past 25 years, since the release of Wayne Wang‘s expansive drama, The Joy Luck Club, there haven’t been a lot of films in the Hollywood system that featured Asian-Americans in substantial roles; let alone managed to assemble a talented ensemble cast. Whilst, the…
It takes quite some time before Kin ramps into its intergalactic promise, with Aussie directors Jonathan and Josh Baker stretching their indie short Bag Man into an odd hybrid feature to try thin the chunky line between on-the-road family drama and sci-fi. And while the uneven plot can be frustrating to witness as it slowly…
Ziad Doueiri’s Oscar nominated film, The Insult (L’insulte) could be called Pride & Prejudice. This isn’t because this Lebanese drama has anything to do with Jane Austen. Rather, it is because this film is all about how one minor conflict between two men escalates because of a combination of hubris and hatred. It seems that…
Before Melissa McCarthy’s involvement essentially fast-tracked The Happytime Murders into production, the dark comedy had languished in development limbo for the good part of decade with both Cameron Diaz and Katherine Heigl attached at various moments as potential headliners. With the final product now upon us, McCarthy’s penchant for vanity-free comedy feels like the most…
You can imagine the meeting. “We need a film for the grey-dollar à la Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.” “How about a story involving a book club? Older women like those.” “Sure, but let’s make it into a rom-com.” “We need to include sex because that sells.” “But they might be a bit old for Sex…
Mandy is a crazy two-hour LSD trip led by a totally unhinged Nicolas Cage performance. The film follows Red (Cage) and Mandy (Andrea Riseborough) who live a peaceful life in the Pacific Northwest, that is until a religious cult barge in and rob Red of the love of his life, sending the man on a…
6 years after The Hunger Games lead the charge of YA dystopia book to film adaptations, a new contender has appeared in an attempt to revive the genre. Adapted from the Alexandra Brooks’ series of the same name, The Darkest Minds combines young adult fiction dystopia with superpowers. When a disease wipes out 90% of…
Spike Lee is quite clearly fired up as he scatters sharp, defiant dialogue all through BlacKKKlansman, his first feature film since 2015’s good-but-uneven Chi-Raq and without a doubt one of his best works to date. That is no overstatement either, with Lee directing a big middle finger to the racism both explicit and implicit, by…
