The artistry of kung fu is found in its discreteness and in its completeness. Most martial arts are composed of distinct movements; thrusts, jabs and parries akin to the bars of a musical composition or the paragraphs of a novel. The fluid fabrication found in these movements coheres into a kind of violent beauty: their…
Halfway into Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, Joseph Gordon-Levitt – battered and bloodied – ascends a fire escape, consumed by trepidation. We know this because he continues to grimly intone his fears on the narration track, and because there’s a woman waiting for him in the hotel room at the top of the…
Death From Above 1979’s 2004 debut You’re a Woman, I’m a Machine always struck me as a scorched earth deal, a grenade tossed by Sebastien Grainger and Jesse F. Keeler into an unsuspecting music scene before striding away, completely nonchalant. The robustness of the record suggested a simplicity that belied how tricky it was to…
I am all about director boxsets. There’s something intimidating about the exploration required to engage in completionist cinephilia, where you endeavour to see every single picture a director filmed, so it’s a relief to simply plonk a box down on your shelf and set yourself a more manageable goal, rather than scurrying around the outskirts…
Given how much time I waste compiling lists, it’s hard not to be disappointed when mistakes are made. So it was with last year’s list of my favourite 20 films of 2013, which crucially omitted Only Lovers Left Alive – which was technically an Australian 2014 release, but I caught the film at BIFF (rest…
Wish I Was Here has copped a lot of undeserved flack; Zach Braff’s foray into Kickstarter to film the thing raised the ire of those who saw his use of the crowdfunding site as a co-option of a resource for everyday Joes and Janes. A lot of critics entered the cinema with well-sharpened knives, and…
Who wouldn’t want to be a vampire? Save the minor inconvenience of hyper-photosensitivity and a rarely quenchable thirst for human blood, you gain the ability to fly, to transform into a bat, and to carry an aura of lascivious sexuality to go with your extended incisors. Not to mention the whole immortality deal, which turns…
If you’re anything like me, you’re tired of reading about Boyhood by now, and the film hasn’t even come out in Australia (it’s released tomorrow). There were the months of pre-release hype as the rumoured-Linklater-twelve-project became an actual thing being released. There was the tsunami of hyperbolic reviews – coming in progressive waves as it…
“90s Music” – the first single from Kimbra’s The Golden Echo – is a misleading introduction in more ways than one. The off-kilter danciness of the track reminds me of Kanye West’s “Power”, in that it’s the kind of pop song that manages to combine infectious glee with intentional abrasiveness; it simultaneously sounds like it…
As a teenager, I would’ve loved the Spierig Brothers’ time travel thriller Predestination; over a decade later, I’m not as enamoured of its conceptual ambition. The film sees Ethan Hawke and Sarah Snook dart and swerve through an entwined net of plot twists taken from a conceptual short story (“All You Zombies”) by Robert Heinlein.…
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