Film & TV

Though it started on what seemed like uneven ground, the final season of HBOs Girls manages to not only pull the series strengths together and end on a high note but also manage to do so while remaining as imperfect and messy as it’s ever been. Even if Lena Dunham’s voice is not “your” voice,…

Jon (Dean O’Gorman, THE HOBBIT Trilogy, TRUMBO), a charming but out-of-luck novelist, musters the bravery needed to try and win back the love of his life by surprising her at a friend’s wedding. One problem: he’s in Auckland and the wedding is in Wellington. After a failed attempt to make the journey south in his…

Tickets are set to be released today for the world-premiere screenings of recipients of the 2016 Lexus Short Film Fellowship. In partnership with the Sydney Film Festival, the short films will be shown at an exclusive screening and throughout the Festival itself in mid-June. This year’s filmmakers and respective short films include Anya Beyersdorf (How the Light…

Before there was Loving there was Sophie & The Rising Sun (well, sort of). Sophie & The Rising Sun is a romantic story and like Loving it is one that’s all about a bi-racial couple. The film is ultimately a beautiful but fictional love story where you can really sit back, relax and get lost…

Wendy & Lucy is a film that could be renamed “A Street Dog Named Lucy.” I tells the story of a homeless and nomadic American woman and her faithful companion, a dog named Lucy. The story is a slow character study that is lacking in characterisation, drama and detail. The story is directed by Kelly…

When Guardians Of The Galaxy was released in 2014 it was considered a gamble, a bunch of rag-tag characters including a talking raccoon and a tree that says only three words. They were barely known outside of the comics so Marvel was taking a huge risk, but it paid off and the film was yet…

Praise Jeebus, the muscles won over the Easter long weekend, as The Fate Of The Furious, the latest film in the Fast and the Furious franchise (and the first since Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift that doesn’t feature Paul Walker) took in $10.07m in its opening week at the box office. The film has…

In some ways, it feels like Zach Braff’s involvement with Going In Style is the most interesting thing about it. Braff, now almost a decade after his tenure on Scrubs, hasn’t exactly had a perfect hit rate on the big screen. It’s not that he’s not an untalented filmmaker, it’s just his previous movies have…

After watching Guardians of The Galaxy the day it hit cinemas in July of 2014 (yes, I feel older and did you know Justin Bieber is 23 now?), I said to myself “I want more, this is going to be pretty massive, I reckon that Groot Tree might be a hit as well”. My mate…

Aziz Ansari’s Emmy award-winning comedy series Master of None is returning to Netflix next month, and the streaming service are teasing us with what to expect via an all-too-brief 70 second trailer that was released earlier this month. After traveling abroad, the show’s second season sees Dev (Aziz Ansari) return to New York to take…

Iconic director Oliver Stone is heading to Australia later this year for an exclusive appearance at Vivid Sydney, as part of the Vivid Ideas Game-Changer Talks Series, as well as at global creative forum Semi Permanent. The prodigious director has written and directed more than 20 full-length feature films over the last four decades, including…

The Australian Director’s Guild (ADG) has announced the nominations for their 2017 Awards, and this year the awards are guaranteed to recognise a new talent, with all five nominees in the category of Best Direction in a Feature Film having made their feature film debut. That’s Garth Davis for Lion, Simon Stone for The Daughter,…

The second part of The Get Down first season (the story of the rise of Hip-Hop and reign of Disco in the 70s’ created by Baz Luhrmann) is an over-dramatic affair, hampered by an occasional inconsistent narrative and schmaltzy performances and yet, the latter half of its five part run is some of the best TV…

Our favourite former congresswoman, senator, vice-president and U.S. president, Selina Meyer is officially out of the oval office for season six of Veep, which returns to our screens next week. As we wait to watch what her future holds on the show we thought we’d put together a list of possible jobs for the woman who can…

In Public Enemy, Guy Béranger, a dangerous child murderer, is at the end of his prison sentence. His release on parole to the custody of the monks at Vielsart Abbey leads to an outcry from the nearby small village and to the rest of the country. This thrilling French-language TV series out of Belgium focuses…

The name Henrietta Lacks may not mean an awful lot to some people but in reality it should be one of the most famous names in history. Lacks is responsible for revolutionising modern medicine and contributing to every recent major medical breakthrough from vaccines for polio, HPV and the flu-shot; to IVF and treatments for…

While he was in Australia last week for a pop-up Los Pollos Hermanos in Sydney, we sat down with the fast food chain’s proprietor Gus Fring – expertly played through Breaking Bad‘s fourth season by Giancarlo Esposito – to talk about the character’s anticipated return in the third season of the Breaking Bad prequel series…

Lone Scherfig is a filmmaker who has always frustrated me, delivering a mixed bag of films amongst her career. Her Dutch films were great, but apart from An Education, her films were ultimately flops, especially the turgid One Day. So I have to admit that I wasn’t looking forward to Their Finest, but when I…

Best known for his role as Emmett Cullen in the Twilight Saga films, Kellan Lutz will be in Australia this week to attend the Gala premiere of the new sci-fi film The Osiris Child: Science Fiction Volume One, at the 2017 Gold Coast Film Festival. In addition to the premiere, Lutz will also pop into…

Episode two of the FX series Outcast‘s second season hits the ground running with a crash outside of town being discovered by a local police officer. It seems that rather than following the original fabricated alibi Giles had created (Mark taking his own life), due to Maggie’s wishes of her husband not seen giving up…

Directed by acclaimed filmmaker, Anne Fontaine (Coco Avant Chanel, Nathalie, Gemma Bovery), The Innocents is based on actual events and set in Poland at the end of world War 2. It tells the story of Mathilde, a young doctor at a Red Cross hospital, who responds to a desperate plea to visit a local Benedictine…

Currently the number one trending video worldwide on YouTube and attracting 25 million views in less than 72 hours, it’s safe to say that Star Wars: The Last Jedi‘s first teaser trailer made its impact over the Easter weekend. And that number just takes into account the ONE official YouTube channel. The trailer had its…

Comic book stories make for some great game adaptations, with the likes of Batman: Under the Hood and Ultimate Spider-Man receiving the video game treatment. As mentioned in our previous article, XII and The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction were both based on stellar comic runs, while games like Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions and Injustice took only…

The Fate of the Furious is out in cinemas today and to celebrate the release of the 8th installment (8th?! Really?!), we are looking back at the ten most outrageous moments in the long-running franchise, in no particular order. Who needs the laws of physics when you got family? Reckless flirting (2 Fast 2 Furious,…

Legendary composer Hans Zimmer has won just about every award in the book – but he’s never performed in Australia. In less than three weeks, however, he’ll be changing that, with a massive arena show called Hand Zimmer Revealed, set to hit the capital cities, shortly after performing in California at the iconic Coachella Music…

Robert Kirkman’s Outcast returned this week and I had the pleasure of being around for its return. I am so glad that a well written and tight nit team of characters and story has graced the screen for another round and I will happily be reviewing the series on a weekly basis. Over the course…

Palace Cinemas are set to screen 20 independent American films for their nationwide Australian debut, as part of the ‘American Essentials’ showcase. The three-week festival will screen various new international film festival debuts, as well as restored American classics. The festival will open with the screening of the Oscar-nominated 20th Century Women, starring Annette Bening…

The Sydney Film Festival, Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA) and The Japan Foundation have announced that David Stratton (much beloved co-host of ABC’s former critic show At the Movies) will present a program of 10 essential films directed by the great Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa….

An impressively persistent beast of sorts, the Fast & Furious franchise has become one of the most lucrative commodities of today’s industry, despite an initial series of less-than sequels that threatened to burn the title out before it had a chance to properly compete. Whereas most sequels fail to maintain momentum (especially when dealing with the…

Some of the first games that I ever played were desktop point and clickers, a genre that has waned in popularity ever since the introduction of console video games. From classic MS-DOS titles like The Treehouse and The Backyard to the gorgeous and cartoony Putt-Putt series, the point and click genre really ignited my passion…