New Zealand writer-director-actor Taika Waititi has always had a quirky comedic streak. With his latest, Hunt for the Wilderpeople, he’s closest to a defining style that can easily translate across a variety of audiences. That might be why he’s been selected to helm the next instalment of Marvel’s Thor franchise. His first feature film Eagle…
My estimable colleague Jono Winter recently posted a favourable – if tentatively favourable – review of X-Men: Apocalypse on this site. As a steadfast fan of (most) of the X-Men films, I found time in my overseas holiday to fit in a (Croatian-subtitled) screening of the film and, regrettably, I can’t concur with his positive…
As Penelope in A Bigger Splash, Dakota Johnson is enigmatic yet authentic, knowing yet naïve; a daughter, a lover, a seductress, and a child all at once. The role allows Johnson to undercut the cliches of Hollywood femininity: innocent child, sexualised nymph, or idealised mother. In projects like A Bigger Splash, television sitcom Ben and Kate…
Action flick Bastille Day opens with a naked Frenchwoman (Stéphane Caillard) strolling through Paris. We soon learn that her nudity is intended to serve as a particularly dramatic distraction, allowing pickpocket Michael Mason (Game of Thrones’ Richard Madden) to pilfer a few wallets and passports at the orders of a local fence (Eriq Ebouaney). With…
Any long-running television show tends to look to its past for inspiration. One of the primary drawcards of serialised TV is characterisation, and what better way to flesh out a character than delve into their past. There’s a tendency for this to go bad – I’m thinking specifically of a second season episode of The…
Marguerite seems like an odd choice to make the move from the Alliance Français French Film Festival to a general Australian release. Granted, it did well at the Cesars, but its pedigree is paired with a lacklustre, sluggish heap of a movie, ambling through half-assed farce and undercooked politics while finding little of merit beyond…
Cartel Land was one of 2015’s most successful documentaries, earning a cavalcade of critical praise and even an Oscar nomination. It’s not hard to see why; Matthew Heineman’s film combines a contentious contemporary issue – Mexico’s fraught, cartel-dominated ‘drug war’ and tensions along the U.S.A./Mexico border – with kinetic, ‘can-you-fucking-believe-they-got-that-shot’ cinematography. It’s the kind of…
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is neither the hero the superhero genre deserves nor the villain it dreads. This is a film about two superheroes waging war with one another that’s similarly at war with itself, riven between competing narratives, commercial concerns and an overarching ambition that sees it striving for meaning before collapsing…
One of the perks – or side effects, if you consider my bank account – of my foray into cinephilia has been my introduction to the UK Blu-Ray/DVD distributors, Arrow. While perhaps less prestigious than the widely-celebrated Criterion Collection, Arrow combine a fantastic, diverse library – cult and trashy horror under Arrow Video and arthouse…
Growing up watching children’s television in the early ‘90s, it was practically impossible to get through a week without being treated to a parable – or if you were unlucky, a lecture – about prejudice and xenophobia. Cartoons would obliquely or explicitly address issues of racism, religion and even AIDS in the context of a…
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