I finally watched The Sacrament after watching Ti West’s featurette on the Criterion House release, where he articulately advocated for art-horror films that are “challenging films.” Ti West’s prior films – well, The House of the Devil and The Innkeepers, anyway – weren’t for everyone, but they were interesting – and, in my book, quality…
Your enjoyment of The Grand Seduction is entirely dependent on having a healthy suspension of disbelief and a broad tolerance for the rom-com formula – if you’re in possession of both those qualities, then you’ll likely have a good time with the film. Starring Brendan Gleeson as the mayor of a sparsely populated Canadian harbour…
“90s Music” – the first single from Kimbra’s The Golden Echo – is a misleading introduction in more ways than one. The off-kilter danciness of the track reminds me of Kanye West’s “Power”, in that it’s the kind of pop song that manages to combine infectious glee with intentional abrasiveness; it simultaneously sounds like it…
As a teenager, I would’ve loved the Spierig Brothers’ time travel thriller Predestination; over a decade later, I’m not as enamoured of its conceptual ambition. The film sees Ethan Hawke and Sarah Snook dart and swerve through an entwined net of plot twists taken from a conceptual short story (“All You Zombies”) by Robert Heinlein.…
Australian cop flick Felony opens with a perfunctory action scene – the only scene in the film that fits that description. Detective Malcolm Toohey (Joel Edgerton, star and screenwriter) gives chase to a crim fleeing the scene, and earns a deposit of lead in his bulletproof vest for his trouble. Struggling to his feet, he…
Within the rusted, mud-splattered framework of William Friedkin’s Sorcerer is a distillation of 1970s American cinema. It has the bruised masculinity of Taxi Driver, the abiding pessimism of Chinatown and the nightmarish madness that would send Coppola deep into the jungles of the Philippines for Apocalypse Now. It’s fitting that its release would be eclipsed…
There’s a conspiratorial tenor to the discourse about Charlie McDowell’s The One I Love, as critics are driven to conniptions contemplating how to discuss the film’s concept. A quarter hour into The One I Love, the rug is pulled from under you as a secluded couple’s getaway – that troubled spouses Mark Duplass and Elisabeth…
By the time punk found me, it had died and been born again many times over. It was 2002, and I’d just moved in to my first share house, a boxy little unit in Toowong filled with empty beer bottles, guitars and – if we’d been slack cleaning the dishes – a colony of maggots.…
The 2014 Israeli Film Festival kicks off tonight in Brisbane and Melbourne, with screenings in other Australian capitals to follow. With the Gaza situation plastered all over the news recently, it’s certainly a difficult time to promote a film festival celebrating the work from a country engaged in such devastating warfare (with questionable tactics, to…
Discussing IkkiTousen’s third season, I described the show as “sexist, and stupid, and slapdash”.” Nonetheless I obviously enjoyed it enough to return for Xtreme Xecutor, season four of the anime. What made me come back for more was the appeal of the show’s “insistence on the insubstantial” – it’s as substantial as a helium balloon,…
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