Thanks to Icon Film Distribution, ccpopculture has 2 John Malkovich prize packs to give away, including Disgrace, RED, Warm Bodies and new pirate series Crossbones, out on Australian DVD on Wednesday December 9th. “One icon stars as another when Hollywood legend, John Malkovich plays Edward Teach, better known as the barbarous pirate Blackbeard in the NBC series, Crossbones. It is 1729 and on…
Writing about Adventure Time’s fourth season last year, I described it as both “fantastic and slightly disappointing” due to its reluctance to continue to expand creatively. But if season four maintained the level of quality and creativity of its prior season, season five ups the game by embracing the show’s potential for melancholy and complexity…
Hark! Another Christmas movie about the redemption of a dysfunctional family—and another lump of coal in my Christmas stocking. Love the Coopers is a woeful attempt at ‘collage’ cinema (multiple sugary plotlines populated by dull caricatures—an oeuvre seemingly popularised by 2003’s Love Actually). If you’re looking for a bit of seasonal cheer, you’re better off…
Creed is a Rocky film, just with a different stance and technique. Like its titular character, Creed is aware of its legacy and honours it while at the same time wanting to make a name for itself. Writer-director Ryan Coogler – best known for Fruitvale Station – demonstrates both a clear admiration for the series and the confidence…
If Iranian cinema has a home, it’s the automobile. Like Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry and Ten, Jafar Panahi’s Tehran Taxi, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad’s Tales, Ali Ahmadzade’s Atomic Heart is a road movie without any particular destination in mind, drifting idly through Tehran’s twilight streets, through conversations about atomic mothers and dormant dictators. But where those…
It’s fitting that Kiwi splatter-comedy Deathgasm introduces its characters with notepad-scribble-flourishes. You see, this film – which combines death metal fanaticism with crude humour and imaginative gore – feels like the product of a couple Year 10 boys giggling at the back of science class, cobbling together ideas in the margins alongside deeply-etched pentagrams and…
Have you ever struck out on a date because of a careless word or a clumsy gesture? Writer-director, Hong Sang-soo, ponders this quandary in Right Now, Wrong Then, a romantic-drama that plays out like a low-key Groundhog Day. The film benefits from strong performances in the lead roles and, despite some ponderous pacing, the central…
I had a melodramatic couple of days at the Brisbane Asia Pacific Film Festival. Starting with Michael Rowe’s Canadian/Australian drama Early Winter, through Simon Stone’s The Daughter and concluding with a retrospective screening of Mikio Naruse’s classic Floating Clouds, my weekend was dominated by the infidelities and dark secrets that define the much-maligned genre of…
Intellectually and artistically, Tehran Taxi is intimidatingly dense. The third in a very loose trilogy from Jahar Panahi – following the Iranian director’s twenty-year ban from filmmaking in 2010 – we spend the entirety of the film in Panahi’s taxi, observing his passenger’s conversations about cinema, censorship and justice through a handful of digital cameras…
If you’re looking for an action-packed, entertaining blockbuster, you won’t find it in the final Hunger Games instalment. The atmosphere here is dour and soaked in dread; fitting, really, given we’re observing the final days of a bloody revolution. Constricted by the expectations of her role as an icon – much like the actress playing…
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