Film & TV

Best known for her roles as the seductive Margaery Tyrell on Game of Thrones and daring film-maker Cressida in the last two Hunger Games films, British actress Natalie Dormer is headed Down Under for the new television adaptation of the 1967 Australian historical mystery novel, Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay. Foxtel announced earlier today…

Tom Cruise flexes his action muscles as Jack Reacher in this sequel based on Lee Child’s bestselling novel Never Go Back, which finds the itinerant ex-military, problem-solver accused of murder, and learning that he may have a child he has never met. It’s a compelling, slick action-adventure with suspenseful plotting and an abundance of smarts…

Starring Jessica Chastain, John Lithgow, Alison Pill and Jake Lacy, Miss Sloane tells the thrilling story of Elizabeth Sloane (Jessica Chastain), the most sought-after and formidable lobbyist in Washington D.C. Known equally for her cunning track record of success, she has always done whatever is required to win. But when she takes on the most…

Rillington Place is a grim, biological crime drama about one of the UK’s most prolific serial killers of the 20th century and a gross miscarriage of justice. Here are five things we learned from this series, which is currently airing on BBC First. 1. Samantha Morton is a brilliant actress. Some readers will be familiar…

Cameraperson shines a light on the individual behind the camera. In this case it is cinematographer, Kirsten Johnson, a woman with some 25 years’ experience in the movie-making business. She’s also known for having worked on films like Fahrenheit 9/11 and Citizenfour, among others. Cameraperson is a documentary that lets the footage speak for itself…

How T2 Trainspotting juggles change and continuity is quite extraordinary. In a world of disappointing reboots and sequels that don’t quite justify their existence, Danny Boyle’s follow-up to his drug-addled 1996 icon is not only good, it’s damn near perfect, complementing the first without repeating it as we catch up with Renton (Ewan McGregor), Sick…

We caught up with T2 Trainspotting Director Danny Boyle on the red carpet of the film’s Sydney premiere to chat about how he approached making the film, (his first ever sequel), his recent TV work, filming in Edinburgh and we find out if he has any Oscar picks for next Monday! You’re a filmmaker who has famously never…

The directorial debut of Andrew Jay Cohen, the co-writer of Bad Neighbours, its sequel and Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates, is hitting cinemas later this year. The House stars Will Ferrell and Amy Poehler as parents who start up an illegal casino in the basement of their friend’s house (Jason Mantzoukas), in order to…

If there’s one filmmaker who, in my opinion, hasn’t made a bad film, that filmmaker would be Martin Scorsese. Venturing from genre to genre with ease (who else can go from the family fantasy Hugo to the dark comedy The Wolf of Wall Street just like that?) and always applying professional care and passion within…

Fast becoming one of the most anticipated Australian films of the year is Stephan Elliot‘s comedy Flammable Children, which is reuniting former Neighbours co-stars Guy Pearce and Kylie Minogue. Today, the official first look images were released and it gives us a taste of what we can expect from the film – with Guy and…

Nicola Yoon‘s popular Young Adult novel from 2015, Everything, Everything, is getting a big screen adaptation later this year, with Stella Meghie (Jean of the Joneses) behind the camera and J. Mills Goodloe penning the screenplay. The story follows 18-year-old Madeline Whittier, who has an obscure condition called severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID) – known in…

Tarsier Studios’ deliciously dark puzzle-platformer Little Nightmares will finally be available for the public at the end of April this year. Having been named “Best Indie” at last year’s Gamescon, the title from the same team who co-developed Tearaway Unfolded with Media Molecule looks to riff further into the adorable world of inventive art focused…

There is something to be said for The Walking Dead’s more tempered episodes. What they lack in action and spectacle, they more than make up for in character building and refining its – at times – capricious narrative. That’s how Greg Nicotero and co. elected to open their second half of season seven but perhaps as…

Never forgive.  Never forget. If there’s one mantra the characters of Big Little Lies live by, it’s that.  Shrewdly written by TV veteran David E. Kelly, HBO’s new seven-arc mini-series is a deliciously wicked slice of suburban slaughter where it’s what’s on the outside that matters most. Based on Australian novelist Liane Moriarty’s best-selling prose,…

A well-intentioned, though not entirely successful debut venture from Luke Scott (son of Alien director Ridley Scott, for those of you playing along at home) Morgan is more a shallow version of Ex-Machina than the slick sci-fi character study it so clearly desires to be. The titular Morgan (Anya Taylor-Joy, maintaining her genre score-card with this, The…

From the moment you step foot into the life of Morgan Yu, you enter a world both new and familiar. Prey draws easy and obvious parallels to Arkane Studios’ award-winning Dishonored series, but with its brilliantly unsettling atmosphere and mind-bending opening level, it presents something unique and altogether exciting.

The popular Netflix series Love is returning for a second season on March 10th and the digital network just released the first trailer for the new series to get us all excited (and on Valentine’s Day no less!). As in the first season, Love follows nice guy Gus (Paul Rust) and brazen wild-child Mickey (Gillian…

The ills of racial segregation have been well-documented in modern cinema; many pieces set in eras like the 60’s have tackled the absurdity and nonsensical way the division functioned in – mostly American – society even when black populations worked side by side with white populations. This is the core tension of Hidden Figures, the…

After much begging and cursing Niantic have finally given us their biggest announcement since the mega successful Pokemon Go app debuted in July of last year. That announcement is Generation 2, and we’re talking an actual Gen 2 release, not a bunch of baby Pokemon you can only hatch from eggs. Sometime over the next…

After a month of teasing us with a “Spring” release date for the much anticipated eighth season of FX’s animated comedy series Archer, we finally know when the first episode will hit our screens. Wednesday, April 5th will see Archer and the gang return, in an alternate 1947 dreamland reality, while our titular hero is…

The hype surrounding the return of Stranger Things to our screens is well and truly swelling, with initial trailers and stills emerging from the closely guarded crew at Netflix. Today, more images have been released to inject more fuel to the Stranger Things fire, which you can view below. A year after Will‘s return from the Upside Down, it would…

You know that the natural order of the world has been restored when a film featuring sexy time does better than a film about a man searching for his birth mother. Fifty Shades Darker, the sequel to 2015’s Fifty Shades of Grey, premiered in theatres this weekend and promptly took its place at the top…

Based on the best-selling novel, Jasper Jones is the story of Charlie Bucktin, a young bookish boy living in a small town. One night, local mixed-race outcast Jasper Jones appears at Charlie’s window and the pair embark on a journey to solve a mystery that will consume the entire community. Jasper Jones has a fantastic…

In A Few Less Men, the sequel to the worldwide hit A Few Best Men, a destination wedding in Australia’s Blue Mountains goes horribly wrong when Luke gets drunk and falls off a cliff. Our boys, David (Xavier Samuel), Tom (Kris Marshall) and Graham (Kevin Bishop) suddenly find themselves transporting their friend’s corpse back to London,…

The Lego Ninjago Movie, the second spin-off of the highly successful Lego Movie (the first being The Lego Batman Movie which will be released on March 30) has received its first trailer. Written by The Hageman Brothers – who also wrote the TV series Lego Ninjago: Masters of Spinjitzu – the film sees young Master…

We get our first look at Sofia Coppola’s (Lost in Translation) period piece The Beguiled in this haunting, racy debut trailer. The Beguiled, adapted by Sofia Coppola from Thomas Cullinan’s novel of the same name, unfolds in a girls’ school in the state of Virginia in 1864. As the Civil War rages, The Miss Martha…

Tropfest, Australia’s most prestigious short film competition and the largest short film festival in the world, took place at Paramatta Park over the weekend as tens of thousands of people turned out to see the breakout of a band of fresh new filmmakers. The 25th iteration of the festival, which culminated with 16 finalists all vying…

The highly anticipated adaptation of the iconic anime Ghost in the Shell is due out next month, with Scarlett Johansson in the lead role. Paramount Pictures just released the second international full length trailer for the release, and you can view it first here: As for the new stills, check them out here: Ghost in…

It’s almost set in Stone (pun not intended) of who will be raking in the Golden Men at the Oscars later this month, as La La Land continued to dominate internationally at the BAFTAs last night, taking home five films including the top award of the night, Best Film, Leading Actress for Emma Stone, Best…

When I first played Kingdom Hearts, it was an unforgettable experience. I loved the world and all of its characters, both new and familiar, and the story was so deep and intricate that I found myself absorbed. At the time, Kingdom Hearts was a stand-alone game, but in the years since, its world has grown,…