Opening this year’s New Zealand International Film Festival and now making its way to Australia, The Dark Horse elevates its familiar storyline through specificity and authenticity. It tells the story of Genesis “Dark Horse” Potini (played by Kiwi character actor Cliff Curtis), an erstwhile speed chess player who now exhibits erratic behaviour fuelled by his…
The phrase “starred up” is British slang, referring to the transfer of a juvenile offender to adult incarceration. In David Mackenzie’s Starred Up the offender in question is Eric (Jack O’Connell). We enter the prison with Eric, watching him as he is strip-searched, as he constructs a makeshift shiv, as he unleashes savage violence on…
Let’s make a mainstream comedy with a pair of intensely unlikable characters with a pathological fixation on power; a failed footballer who tackles children (Jake Johnson) and a games designer who’s upset that he doesn’t run the place (Damon Wayans Jr). Let’s allow them to indulge their power trip by impersonating police officers, because that…
Describing Locke as a one-man show is misleading; yes, Tom Hardy as titular protagonist Ivan Locke is the only actor on screen throughout, but this is not some experimental, Manakamana-esque piece of cinéma vérité where we stare into Hardy’s handsome visage for ninety wordless minutes as he drives from point A to point B. Instead,…
I assume that the melodramatic machinations of Miss Julie played like gangbusters in 1890s Sweden, but a century later it all rings pretty false. Bergman acolyte Liv Ullmann sneaks in a reference to Cries and Whispers in the opening flashback and executes an excellent final shot, but otherwise can’t overcome the inherent staginess of the…
Lilting is a sensory experience. Describing a film in this way typically refers to the two expected senses: sight and sound. Hong Khaou’s debut feature film evokes scent; given all the references to smell, I don’t think it’s accidental. It has the delicate odour of clean skin, that sickly sweet smell of warm milk. The…
The generations that lived through the ‘Great War’ are, by-and-large, no more, and the stories told about the war begin to become just that, blurring the line between fact and fiction as the war moves from lived experience to history. Testament of Youth is adapted from a testament itself: Vera Brittain’s memoirs of World War…
So I saw my first Nicholas Sparks movie and … I didn’t hate it? Maybe the two glasses of wine beforehand affected my judgment, as I can hardly defend the film from an “objective” perspective. It’s riddled with problems, including: The casting of Luke Bracey as the teenage version of James Marsden; not only does…
When is a found footage film not a found footage film? When it’s Banshee Chapter, apparently, which borrows the grungy, handheld aesthetic of found footage without much actual found footage to be, uh, found. Writer/director Blair Erickson’s debut feature actually makes pretty good use of this questionable stylistic choice, surprisingly enough. Banshee Chapter ain’t pretty,…
The concept of a ‘controlled avalanche’ seems paradoxical; while engineers can predict the outcome of an avalanche set off by an explosion with some certainty, the expectation of complete control for thousands of tonnes of rolling snow is patently ludicrous. One such ‘controlled’ avalanche, tumbling towards the ski resort housing Tomas (Johannes Kuhnke), Ebba (Lisa…
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