The premise of The DUFF is taken from a novel published in 2010, but it feels two decades older than that. DUFF, you see, stands for “designated ugly fat friend”; the kind of jokey attempt at anthropological analysis of high schoolers that went out of fashion around Mean Girls. The film’s titular DUFF is Bianca…
Looking back at The Fast and the Furious (in case you’re puzzled by the title, that’s the first one, made in 2001) from 2015, the film looks a lot like a stepping stone. An unassuming genre picture that shared more than a bit in common with the preceding year’s Gone in Sixty Seconds remake, its…
If you’ve been following ccpopculture for a while, you might have noticed that kids’ films are rarely reviewed here. That’s not an accident; I’m simply aware of my strengths and weaknesses as a critic, and writing about children’s entertainment is most definitely a weakness. When it comes to Shaun the Sheep, for instance, I can…
You don’t have dig particularly deep to find similarities between Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Russian drama Leviathan and Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Turkish drama Winter Sleep. They were erstwhile competitors across last year’s arthouse awards season; Ceylan took the lead early by picking up the Palme d’Or at Cannes, but Leviathan was more successful in more mainstream awards…
Up until now, Australian actor Damon Gameau had probably been best known as ‘that guy from The Tracker (Rolf de Heer, 2002)’ or ‘that guy from Underbelly: a Tale of Two Cities’. Nowadays, I suspect we’re more likely to start referring to him as ‘that sugar guy’, after his documentary, That Sugar Film. The film…
The world of T.S. Spivet (Kyle Catlett) is certainly inviting. It’s a splendiferous realm of rare bugs, perpetual motion machines and preternaturally gifted preteens, painted in a hyper-saturated palette of green grass, gold wheatfields and cerulean skies. Save for the dead twin brother, who wouldn’t want to live there? Jean-Pierre Jeunet delves into dense fantasia…
Is it weird that I associate Aussie alt-rocker Courtney Barnett with Aussie comedian Hannah Gadsby? They don’t look much alike but I don’t think it’s a crazy comparison to make. Both possess the straight-talking, cigarettes-and-VB aura of Australiana. They both spent at least some of their formative years in Tasmania. Each has succeeded in traditionally…
The original French title of Girlhood is Bande de filles – roughly, “girl gang” – and the difference between the two titles is illustrative of the dualism of director Céline Sciamma’s approach to the film. Centring on sixteen year old girl Marieme (Karidja Touré), the film provides an individual-centric portrait of her experience – friendship,…
Comparing David Cronenberg’s Hollywood satire Maps to the Stars with Ari Folman’s Hollywood satire The Congress is an effective demonstration of how originality and quality don’t always go hand-in-hand. Of the two films, The Congress is far and away the most original, draping an overabundance of ideas offer a scaffolding constructed out of equal parts…
On the surface, Insurgent appears to be a substantial upgrade to Divergent. The cast is fleshed out with the likes of Naomi Watts and Octavia Spencer, we’ve got a new director (Robert Schwentke, responsible for The Time Traveller’s Wife and, uh, R.I.P.D.) and we’ve even moved to the third dimension. Visually, we’ve definitely stepped things…
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