Like the paper flowers that William Blake (Johnny Depp) finds absent natural scent, Dead Man is built on self-conscious artificiality. Jim Jarmusch’s neo-Western is as influenced by woodcut animation or a matinee performance of a silent-movie serial; where Sergio Leone’s post-modern approach the Western exaggerated the cinematic tropes of the genre, Jarmusch filters those conventions…
“Why can’t I be Frank?” That’s the question that comes to hang over milquetoast, mediocre keyboard player Jon (Domhnall Gleeson), just as the sullen mannequin-fucker Don (Scoot McNairy) predicted it would. The Frank in question is played by Michael Fassbender, though you’ll have to take my word for this, as he spends the majority of…
Today heralded the end of a great Australian festival that has lasted over two decades. I’m not referring to the Big Day Out, whose cultural capital was irrevocably eroded by the influx of teenage, Australian-flag-wearing bogans a decade ago and has limped its way to extinction ever since. No, I’m talking about the Brisbane International…
If I’m being honest, I’m pretty well out of the loop when it comes to modern anime. The last time I was seriously invested in the medium was just over a decade ago, where my girlfriend at the time’s anime obsession incited me to explore a range of anime titles. Since then, I’ve mostly lost…
It goes without saying that The Running Man, the Schwarzenegger sci-fi action film adapted from not-Stephen-King’s novel, is a prescient piece of work, predicting both terrible reality television (here more violent and with more game show trappings) and The Hunger Games. Except generally prescience goes hand-in-hand with coherence, and there’s little of that on offer…
22 Jump Street is the kind of sequel you get from people who hate sequels. That’s not an entirely bad thing. This is the first sequel Hollywood wunderkinds Chris Lord and Phil Miller have helmed, though not the first they’ve inspired: they fobbed off Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 to Cody Cameron and…
Early in Galore, Billie (Ashleigh Cummings) intones in voiceover that her life on the outskirts of Canberra is soon to be devastated by a bushfire. It’s the kind of introduction that’s there to assure its audience that this all means something. A shame, because Galore is most meaningful when it’s simply existing. The first half…
There’s something intoxicating about the thrill of a perfect musical moment. When you hear that song – whether it’s on the radio, on the record, or on the stage – and there’s this transcendent surge as you’re transported somewhere else. Perhaps that rare electricity was coursing through legendary DJ John Peel’s veins when he famously…
The Two Faces of January is set in 1962, but it could just have easily been made in the same year, or even a decade earlier. The film – from Drive screenwriter Hossein Amini – is a close facsimile of the thrillers of half a century ago, to the point where it could be a…
2014’s Sydney Film Festival was only my second film festival (after last year’s Brisbane International Film Festival) and my first time travelling to attend a festival. All told I caught eleven films over a long weekend, and had an excellent time, thanks to so much more than those films (though I remain jealous of anyone…
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