Dear diary, This afternoon was my first full day at Sydney Film Festival this year. After an early-morning interview and a screening of Kris Swanberg’s Unexpected, I saw The Diary of a Teenage Girl. It was a last minute decision – I was originally going to see Villa Touma, but managed to hunt down a…
On the 18th of April, 2014, an avalanche on the slopes of Mount Everest claimed sixteen lives; the worst accident in Everest history until the recent devastation of the Nepalese earthquake. The sixteen men that died were all Sherpas – underpaid Nepalese who risked and, ultimately, lost their lives on the treacherous Khumbu Icefall so…
At first glance, Sebastián Silva’s Nasty Baby appears to slot neatly into the Noah Baumbach/Lena Dunham school of New York indie. You know the type. Loose, naturalistic dramas about trendy people in a trendy city, leavened with a hint of comedy before drifting towards Serious Issues that aren’t taken all that seriously. For most of…
Unlocking the Truth are a metal band composed of African-American teenagers – and I’m talking, like, their-voices-haven’t-broken-yet-teenagers – from Brooklyn. After a YouTube video of the group busking at Times Square went viral, they scored a $1.8 million record deal and performed at Coachella. In most documentaries, that would be the story. Check out these…
As the second instalment in my series of “cheat sheets” on films taught in secondary schools for SBS Movies, I took a look at Rabbit-Proof Fence, a powerful film centring on the plight of Australia’s stolen generations. It’s also paired with a free stream of the feature film (for now, anyway) for Australian audiences, while…
The community at the centre of Ariel Kleiman’s Partisan is introduced with rare restraint and precision. After a short prologue, we are deposited into a secluded society, buried within sheltering slabs of through which thin rays of sunlight shine. The society (described in most reviews as a ‘cult’, though I’d argue that’s an overly simplistic…
My earliest memories of Hot Chip are on the dancefloor. The place was Common People, circa mid-2000s. It was a scungy Brisbane nightclub for hipsters before that term had become the nebulous pejorative it is nowadays, the descendant of the Depot and the ancestor of a string of replacements (Gossip, Magazine, others). Common People only…
Mad Max: Fury Road isn’t going to change your life. It’s probably not necessary to clarify that, but I thought it was worth noting in the wake of the torrent of #MadMadFuryRoad hype and hyperbole that has consumed Twitter regarding George Miller’s long-(long)-awaited follow-up to his original Mad Max trilogy. Believe the hype, but don’t…
Alex Garland’s work as a novelist (The Beach, Coma) and screenwriter (28 Days Later, Sunshine) is, at its best, defined by a careful command of tone balanced with obvious intelligence. It should not come as a surprise that Ex Machina, Garland’s first time behind the director’s chair, demonstrates these qualities in abundance. This sparse sci-fi…
There are two Pitch Perfects in Pitch Perfect 2. The first Pitch Perfect is pretty much the Pitch Perfect you’d expect – the first one all over again. This Pitch Perfect takes the Ghostbusters approach to sequels, by repeating all the same beats and bits note for note. All female a capella group the Barden…
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