Three-and-a-half decades ago, Alien established Ridley Scott as a director to watch. Drawing on the conventions of the increasingly-popular slasher film and rejecting the Star-Trek-esque optimism of the sci-fi films of that era, he created a chilling classic. But his potential as a director has dribbled away somewhat in the years since; while I don’t…
Watch Macbeth if you like your Shakespeare slick and relentlessly bleak. Michael Fassbender gives an awards-worthy clinic as the flawed, tortured king. But a word of warning: this story is not for everyone; and I recommend doing your homework. I’ve never studied ‘The Scottish Play’ and I found the language equal parts beautiful and frustrating…
Despite my storied history of nerdy pursuits, I’ve never really been a comic book reader. I’ve read some of the canon titles – you know, Watchmen, Kingdom Come, and, um, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics? – but it’s only recently that I’ve begun to educate myself in the medium, picking up some discount trades…
Andrei Konchalovksy’s The Postman’s White Nights consciously blurs the line between documentary and fiction, with an introductory title card noting that the characters are primarily played by residents of the rural community of Lake Kenozero. This presumably positions the film as commentary on contemporary Russia. It sort of is; the film’s strongest stretch is its…
Trust Denis Villeneuve to take what could have been a fairly conventional drug war thriller and transform it into a hollowed-out horror movie. His latest film, Sicario is, at its core, a scathing indictment of modern American patriarchy. He pulled a similar trick with 2013’s underrated Prisoners, realising an unapologetically pulpy script as a deeply…
I remember a time. A special time, when around every corner was another secret waiting to be discovered, another story to be told. It was a time that could never end. Of course it did end. We grew up. Reality intertwined our perception and the tales we’d created faded into insignificance. Pan asks us to…
“You’re telling me we lost our president like we… lost a set of car keys. This is the most powerful nation in the history of the planet. This is America, and as Vice President of this great nation, I am commanding you to sort this shit out.” That quote gives you a good indication of…
Not long after M. Night Shyamalan’s Sixth Sense opened in 1999, my parents dragged my brother along to the theatre to watch it because “we had to see it.” They’d seen it already, of course, and I suspect their second visit was as much motivated by analysing the construction of the film’s famous twist as…
Michael Winterbottom’s fictionalised account of the Amanda Knox trial appears to present its mission statement early on, with Kate Beckinsale explaining, “You can’t tell the truth unless you make it a fiction.” Unfortunately, The Face of an Angel – which turns out, in fact, to be a a fictional film about the making of a…
Is it weird that cinema is almost entirely absent realistic presentations of office politics? Don’t expect Office, an office-drama-comedy-romance-musical from Hong Kong director Johnnie To to buck that trend. Realism is almost entirely avoided in this tale of ambition, set in the heady times of pre-GFC 2007 and staged on an abstract, artificial, gorgeous set…
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