Film & TV

It has been an extremely busy few weeks for The Iris, with the video game world stuck in the lunacy of E3, Supanova in Sydney and the Sydney Film Festival, we have finally calmed down a little and sunk back into some great couch time with some excellent TV and it gave me some time…

Whilst animation in film has evolved immensely over the last 20 years, there’s something immediately charming about Phantom Boy‘s deliberately flat and simple palleted aesthetic.  It may lack the emotional weight of the technically more refined Pixar offerings, but this film’s distinct look feels organically melded to its somber mentality. Coming courtesy of French directing…

Based on a memoir by American writer James Lord and adapted for the screen by actor Stanley Tucci, Final Portrait is a concise passion project with committed performances and evident production care that sadly doesn’t overcome its bland setting. Anchored by a wonderful turn from Geoffrey Rush as eccentric painter Giacometti, this dramedy of sorts…

To help celebrate the release of Baby Driver, Stars Ansel Elgort and Lily James will join writer-director Edgar Wright in Sydney for the Australian Premiere. The premiere will take place on Wednesday 12th July, 2017 at Event Cinemas, George St. The trio will walk the red carpet, before joining Australian director George Miller on stage to introduce…

In Home Again, Reese Witherspoon stars as a recently divorced single mother whose life is complicated with the addition of three young men coming to live with her, just after her 40th Birthday. Witherspoon is joined by the likes of Nat Wolff and Michael Sheen for this romantic comedy, which hits US cinemas in September….

Acclaimed Indigenous  Australian director, writer and performer Leah Purcell has been awarded the 2017 Sydney-UNESCO City of Film Award at last night’s closing of the Sydney Film Festival. The award follows a huge year for Leah, from adapting and starring in the theatre adaptation of acclaimed Australian novel The Drover’s Wife, with which she won the…

The Sydney Film Festival has come to a close for another year – and with it come all the great memories of the films that surprised us, inspired us and left us wishing the event would never end. Alas, it has – but here are five films we’re taking away with us as the best…

“100” just may be the best episode Fear the Walking Dead has done to date. Daniel Salazar (Rubén Blades) was always one of the more interesting characters – that isn’t saying much though – in the show, up until the point where the writers made the terrible decision to randomly send him into “crazy” mode…

Powershop and the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) are inviting filmmakers, and anyone in the filmmaking spirit, to create a short film for the inaugural Powershorts Film Comp in Australia. To enter, contestants must shoot a film using only their smartphones, keep it anywhere between 10 sec and 3 mins and it must include the…

Last night’s Closing Gala for the 2017 Sydney Film Festival saw an array of diverse Australia films and talent receive distinctions, as well as the Australian premiere of highly-anticipated Netflix Original Film Okja as the 64th Festival came to a close. The prestigious Sydney Film Prize was awarded to Ildikó Enyedi‘s intriguing love story On Body and Soul, while…

A song is as song except when it’s a Terrence Malick film. The famous director’s latest experimental offering is an absolute waste in that it is all show and no substance. It weaves together cameos from famous A-list creatives and a cast of Hollywood’s finest actors and then it does nothing. Absolutely nothing. For 129…

Okja is a film involving a giant mutated pig. What more do you want? But seriously, in order to understand the hype of the film, you have to know the filmmaker Bong Joon-Ho. Bong Joon-Ho is an acclaimed Korean filmmaker who has made some incredible films. And the reason he is so acclaimed is his…

The story of The Go-Betweens had previously been largely untold save for Robert Forster’s autobiography, Grant & I. But the film, The Go-Betweens: Right Here is set to change that. It’s a wonderful music documentary that plays out like a love letter to a seminal, Australian band. It also dives head-first into the melodrama, adventure,…

Fans of off-kilter comedy should find something of value in Jeff Baena’s quirky spoof The Little Hours, a play on the 14th-century Giovanni Boccaccio novella The Decameron. With hefty doses of witchcraft, torture, and pan-sexuality peppered throughout the script, it’s not hard to see some viewers being confounded by Baena’s film just as much as those…

Thoroughly engaging, immensely poignant, and remarkably evocative, Call Me By Your Name functions as both a coming-of-age tale and a love story, likely to surprise viewers as to where it travels on both accounts. Based on the novel by Andre Aciman, and co-penned for the screen by director Luca Guadagnino (A Bigger Splash), James Ivory…

It would have been too easy for a film like Una to result in something unreservedly perfunctory. The fable of the abuse victim confronting her perpetrator has been depicted more than one would wish to count, and the argument can be made that a fair share wishes to portray the subject matter no more than…

Having proven his worth as a screenwriter with both Hell or High Water and Sicario, Wind River serves as scribe Taylor Sheridan’s directorial debut.  Arguably arriving with high expectations, Sheridan’s tight, often brutal thriller proves his workings with such professionals as David Mackenzie and Denis Villeneuve has paid off, showcasing an ease behind the lens…

The sequel to the 2015 smash comedy Daddy’s Home has received its first trailer and it’s a star studded affair that’s shaping up to be hilarious. Sean Anders directs again as Dusty (Mark Wahlberg) and Brad (Will Ferrell) join forces to provide their kids with the perfect Christmas. Their newfound partnership is put to the test when…

Making his directorial debut, penning the script and holding the starring role, Austrian actor Josef Hader has impressed festivals around the world with the dark comedy Wild Mouse – which has had its Australian premiere this week as part of the Sydney Film Festival. The film stars Hader as Georg, a classical music critic who…

Audacious is definitely the right word to start with when it comes to describing the Mathieu Denis and Simon Lavoie-directed Those Who Make Revolution Halfway Only Dig Their Own Graves. At 180 minutes, it’s a leviathan of a film that often comes across as equal parts provocative and indecipherable. The central narrative here centers on…

It’s nothing we haven’t seen before, from Groundhog Day to recent teen drama Before I Fall, a character wakes up to the same day repeated, every day, trying to convince everyone around them they’re in a time loop. But what if you woke up to the same day, straight after your murder? That’s the question…

I don’t want to make a Star Trek joke – it’d be too obvious and you would only resent me for it – but as much as it pains me, I do need to say that space really is the final frontier. It’s always right there, just outside our atmosphere, and for decades we humans…

It has finally arrived! After the teaser trailer that saw Lightning McQueen being absolutely annihilated on the racetrack months ago, we were all left wondering exactly where the Cars franchise had taken us with this all new installment, especially after the disappointing Cars 2 and Disney’s attempt at making it a broader universe with the…

The Brisbane International Film Festival is ready to return in 2017 with its first screening program in three years, thanks to the support of the Queensland Government through Screen Queensland and the expertise of industry partner Palace Cinemas. The Brisbane International Film Festival will run from August 17th until September 3rd and will be co-directed…

Despicable Me 3 opens this week and it brings with it a charming, if not a little repetitive, new chapter in the franchise. The entire gang is back to cause, create and then solve a global catastrophe. More of a good thing isn’t always better, kind of like chocolate and wine (ok, maybe just chocolate),…

Six female-led projects have now become funding recipients of Screen Australia and News Digital Networks Australia’s With Her In Mind Network‘s initiative Doco180, a new project aimed to promote social media-friendly documentaries designed to make the viewer ‘do a 180’ on a topic relevant to Australian women, in 180 seconds. The documentaries selected to be part…

Starring a cast of big comedy names like Keegan-Michael Key, Cobie Smulders, and Billy Eichner, Netflix‘s latest series Friends From College looks to be a fun fueled comedy with it’s fair share of drama. Following a group of friends who have become disconnected since college, Friends From College explores the balance between their relationships and…

Lazily touted in headlines as “The Hangover for women” by writers who couldn’t possibly find another film to compare it to from the last decade (Bachelorette or Bridesmaids immediately come to mind, both of which were also compared to The Hangover at the time of release – hell, even Bad Moms was!), Rough Night is…

It doesn’t take very long for the third season of Netflix’s Original Series Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt to remind its audience why it’s such a powerful and unexpected treasure. In 2015, the show first hit Netflix and was praised by critics and general audiences for its humour and overall freshness from the generic television show. By the…

Agnieszka Holland creates a character to love and to loath in Spoor, the Polish thriller-comedy that follows one woman’s passion for animal justice in a town that doesn’t share the same sentiments. Spoor, meaning the tracks left by an animal, is a film that rarely falls from the trail, coming together as a poignant comedy…