Reviews

The strong, funny and perhaps a little clumsy panda is back on the screen to entertain the audience once again in Kung Fu Panda 3. Produced by DreamWorks Animation in a first time collaboration with China’s Oriental DreamWorks, the Kung Fu Panda franchise is back with its third installment on the screen after a 3…

Directed by Luca Guadagnino, A Bigger Splash is an erotic thriller that sees rockstar-on-leave Marianne Lane (Tilda Swinton) idyllic life with her boyfriend (Matthias Schoenaerts) on an isolated Italian island threaten to implode when Lane’s former-producer (Ralph Fiennes) and his daughter (Dakota Johnson) make an unexpected visit. The story here is actually based on an older Italian-French…

New in films that unexpectedly leave you completely satisfied and slightly breathless: Victoria, a two-hour, one-shot, action-drama from Director Sebastian Schipper. It’s a film that takes you all over the late-night streets of Berlin as the sun slowly creeps up and the fallout from a chance encounter continues to get more and more intense until…

Over the last few years the horror community have been fortunate enough to have select titles presented to them that prove their genre is still alive and well.  Like The Babadook and It Follows before it, The Witch is a chill-inducing creeper of a film that is likely to stay with you long after you’ve left…

At first glance, it seems a little odd to see Batman headlining the follow up to 2013’s Man of Steel. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is an undeniably clunky title but, having seen it, it feels surprisingly fitting. It’s far more of a Batman film than it is a Superman one. There’s a lot going on here and while…

Set in the Wild West, Jane Got a Gun centres around Jane Hammond (Natalie Portman), her outlaw husband Bill (Noah Emmerich) and Jane’s ex-lover Dan Frost (Joel Edgerton).  Bill finds himself in a bit of trouble from an outlaw gang and their leader Colin (Ewan McGregor) wants him dead.  In a desperate effort to save…

The Daughter brings together an incredible Australian cast with Director and Writer Simon Stone, who penned the Belvoir adaptation and marks his screen debut debut here, as did Cowell with Guthrie. The 1884 Norwegian play has been transformed here into an Australian family drama (though the duck, naturally, remains present), set on the NSW South Coast, focusing on a family and…

Disney hits the mark again with Zootopia (directed by Byron Howard & Rich Moore).  Surprisingly different from the other Disney films that leave you crying and happy at the same time, Zootopia is mostly a feel good film. It centers on Judy Hopps (voiced by Ginnifer Goodwin) who sticks to her dream of becoming a…

American nationalism is back on-screen once again in full display in the action sequel to Olympus Has Fallen. On a minor note, Gerard Butler, Aaron Eckhart, Morgan Freeman, Angela Bassett and others from the previous film are back as well. But seriously, the first film, by director Antoine Fuqua of Training Day fame, was a…

Ghostland isn’t your average documentary. It echoes the story of The God’s Must Be Crazy in both a whimsical and crushing way. Ju / ‘Hoansi Bushmen are a tribe in Namibia. After hunting laws came into place their way of life was changed. Without the ability to hunt they had to survive off bushland berries…

Operator is a film with a lot to say and a lot more on its mind. It’s a romantic drama that’s sure to resonate as a cautionary tale for SXSW audiences. The film examines the relationship between Joe (Martin Starr), a programmer working on cutting-edge digital customer service software and his wife Emily (Mae Whitman), a hotel concierge who moonlights in a…

Producer J.J Abrams is a big fan of mystery, so the frugal promotional campaign leading up to 10 Cloverfield Lane, a film that is conceptually linked to shaky-cam monster classic Cloverfield, really wasn’t all that surprising. A trailer was randomly sprung upon us featuring serial scene-stealer John Goodman getting smacked over the head with a…

Offensive. Repulsive. Shocking. Unapologetic. These words are always associated with a film starring Sasha Baron Cohen as the lead. Films such as Borat, Bruno and The Dictator have brought levels of laughter due shock and wit, and with his latest film, Grimsby, it is no exception. If you hated any of those movies, punch out…

When it comes to modern crime thrillers, film sometimes has trouble competing with television. Each year sees dozens of TV series – prime-time, cable and otherwise – tackle the genre and for a film to really stand out against this herd and compete with stuff like True Detective or Luther, it has to go big or go home….

In terms of Coen brothers fare, Hail, Caesar! stands as one the duo’s most carefree affairs. Doing away with a cohesive narrative and firing on cylinders that are very much their own, the film is sure to tickle the funny bone of die-hard Coen brothers fans but likely to polarise general audiences who will attend…

Charming, funny, poignant and so very British, The Lady in the Van is a wonderfully entertaining true story (of sorts) anchored by an unrelenting performance from Maggie Smith. Based on the memoir by playwright Alan Bennett, this quirky comedy soars when Smith’s titular lady is at her most cantankerous and the unlikely relationship Bennett shared with her…

It is a truth universally acknowledged that when Hollywood is on to a good thing, they will milk the shit out of it and exploit it until audiences are sick of it and then move on to the next “cool” thing. Right now that thing is very much zombies, so don’t be surprised to see…

Clearly a passion project for director Michael Bay, 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi is a far-more restrained feature from the usually excessive filmmaker who (mostly) avoids the political side of things to deliver a factually-based action film. Surprisingly streamlined despite its overblown 144 minute running time, the film is the most disciplined we’ve seen Bay…

Gods of Egypt isn’t bad – but it certainly feels out of place. It feels like an effects-heavy blockbuster from a time before superheroes ruled the box office. With no spandex in sight, the movie stands out like a sore thumb. While this does the movie some favors, there’s plenty of other missteps which act as…

Saul (Géza Röhrig) is a Sonderkommando: a prisoner of Auschwitz who assists in the extermination of his own race. That requires a great deal of work, which, apparently, is far too dirty for the hands of Nazi soldiers. Each day, he ushers the people in and cleans the remains of the showers with hopeless resignation….

Highlighting every little detail from Colm Toibin’s superb novel, screenwriter Nick Hornby’s skilful words effortlessly give life to Brooklyn, a simple story that proves there’s more power in how you tell your tale than the tale itself. An intellectually and emotionally satisfying film, Brooklyn’s best asset is indeed the coming-of-age performance from Saoirse Ronan, the…

It goes without saying that football is a sport that potentially endangers its player’s week in and week out with their bodies constantly put at risk due to the intense contact required for the game to be played. Of course, the money involved in all aspects surrounding the game means everyone involved will do whatever…

Dalton Trumbo was a political activist, a writer, a family man, and a man of principle. In Trumbo, a new film starring Bryan Cranston in the leading role, we’re taken back to a time when going against the grain was grounds for treason and imprisonment.  It’s one of the most intriguing – and ghastly –…

When the first Zoolander film hit the cinema in 2001, the world was a very different place.  Smartphone technology went as far as colour screens (pretty sure we were all still playing that weird snake game on our phones waiting at the bus stop with our travel 10s), but with zero online connectivity.  Social media…

When you hear the words ‘food-critic’, Jonathan Gold is probably the kind of person you imagine and City of Gold is a sprawling documentary that explores what life is like for the Pulitzer-winning restaurant critic. It’s as much a love-letter to Gold and his work as it is the city of LA and Director Laura Gabbert lets City of…

For a while there it looked like the only version of Deadpool we’d ever see on the big screen was the somewhat cringe-inducing one we saw in X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Studio execs at Fox were unsure about how to move forward with the character and make it a viable film. But when some test footage…

Internet comedy team Rooster Teeth have been kicking around for over a decade now. They created the cult machinima series Red vs Blue and from there, expanded into a community driven, multi-channel, YouTube sensation. It is with that growth and loyal fan base that they were able to drum up over US$2 million on Indiegogo…

Steve Jobs is the highly anticipated and Oscar nominated film based on the life of the late Apple CEO and co-founder of the same name. It’s the second take at a biopic on the iconic entrepreneur since his death – the first, Jobs (2013) starring Ashton Kutcher was widely panned, and didn’t see the support of…

Best known for co-writing on Sasha Baron Cohen projects (Borat, Ali G), Dan Mazer’s 2013 directorial debut I Give It A Year was a crowd-pleasing, fairly underrated romantic comedy, that brought together a stellar cast and showed Mazer as a Director to watch in the commercial sphere. Fast forward three years and Mazer’s follow up film,…

Adopting a story that tragically resembles real-life accounts, and presenting an opening 40-or-so minutes that prove an uneasy watch, Room is an initially cold but masterful drama all the same.  Describing the film as cold is not a criticism on its part though as director Lenny Abrahamson has displayed such skill in housing the film…