Reviews

Joe Cinque’s Consolation is a film that throws up a lot of questions. How much responsibility should society accept in a murder trial? Is a murder a preventable death? To what extent can we describe an inexplicable crime? This Australian film is based on some true events and is adapted from Helen Garner’s award-winning true…

With the hype likening this Tate Taylor thriller to last year’s hit Gone Girl, The Girl On The Train returns to the classic bleak style but without the twists and turns that make the genre interesting. Adapting a fan-favourite page-turner to the big screen is always a risk, especially when that adaptation involves a relocation…

Whilst Tim Burton is far from being back to his winning form, Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children is at least a step in the right direction for a filmmaker who has always found comfort in showcasing the weird and wonderful. Though the film slightly feels like a fantasy cash-in, much in the way features…

The trailers for the documentary Amanda Knox (which debuts on Netflix in late September) questions whether the eponymous star did or didn’t commit the murder of British exchange student, Meredith Kercher. The crime that occurred in Perugia Italy in 2007 had an investigation that had more holes than a pile of Swiss cheese. This documentary…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

Seth Rogen has always been associated with stoner humour and raunchy comedy, but in the case of Sausage Party, he takes it to a whole new level. With animated films that have anthropomorphised objects like toys (i.e. the Toy Story films) and cars (i.e. Cars), Rogen had the idea to anthropomorphise consumer products while retaining…

Unapologetic, bold Australian “black comedy” Down Under had its world premiere earlier this year the 63rd annual Sydney Film Festival, the only logical platform for Writer/Director Abe Forsythe to debut his second feature film seeing as it concerns one of the most talked about and shameful moments in the city’s history. This inevitably controversial film…

When I realized that the directors of this film (also the writers of The Hangover) also directed the awful 2013 teen comedy 21 and Over and contributed screenplays to abysmal comedies like Four Christmases, Ghost of Girlfriends Past and Rebound, it’s fair to say that I went into Bad Moms – out in cinemas tomorrow…

The DC Comics Extended Universe (aka DCEU) has a bit of catching up to do if it wants to level up to its competitor Marvel. Even though DC has some of the more renowned superheroes in its deck of cards – Superman and Batman being two aces – it hasn’t had as much luck with…

It’s not very often a film will change my perspective on life, but after viewing Taryn Brumfitt’s documentary Embrace it was a completely different story. The roots of this inspiring documentary stem from a post of Brumfitt’s that went viral in 2013, depicting Taryn in an unconventional before and after photo – from having a…

Amongst the tales of historical power couples – Cleopatra and Caesar, Kahlo and Rivera, Boleyn and King Henry – none have dragged society to their feet in sheer anticipation as the reunion of Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon. We know the name, and despite their absence in the fourth installment, Damon and Greengrass return to…