Australian cop flick Felony opens with a perfunctory action scene – the only scene in the film that fits that description. Detective Malcolm Toohey (Joel Edgerton, star and screenwriter) gives chase to a crim fleeing the scene, and earns a deposit of lead in his bulletproof vest for his trouble. Struggling to his feet, he…
There’s a conspiratorial tenor to the discourse about Charlie McDowell’s The One I Love, as critics are driven to conniptions contemplating how to discuss the film’s concept. A quarter hour into The One I Love, the rug is pulled from under you as a secluded couple’s getaway – that troubled spouses Mark Duplass and Elisabeth…
By the time punk found me, it had died and been born again many times over. It was 2002, and I’d just moved in to my first share house, a boxy little unit in Toowong filled with empty beer bottles, guitars and – if we’d been slack cleaning the dishes – a colony of maggots.…
The 2014 Israeli Film Festival kicks off tonight in Brisbane and Melbourne, with screenings in other Australian capitals to follow. With the Gaza situation plastered all over the news recently, it’s certainly a difficult time to promote a film festival celebrating the work from a country engaged in such devastating warfare (with questionable tactics, to…
Over at the 500 Club, Jesse Thompson and myself took a look at some films screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival on Sunday the 3rd of August. My lineup for the day included Journey to the West, Fish & Cat, We Are the Best! and The Immigrant. Read the roundup at The 500 Club.
An adaptation such as the recent Golden Age trilogy prompts questions about the nature of what is and isn’t a “remake.” Do we treat these three films as a fresh adaptation of the long-running dark fantasy manga, or as a reinterpretation of the 1997 anime series closely inspired by that text? When we evaluate the…
Over at the 500 Club, Jesse Thompson and myself took a look at some films screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival on Saturday the 2nd of August. My lineup for the day included Norte, the End of History; Eastern Boys; Two Days, One Night; Goodbye to Language and Afflicted. Read the roundup at The…
Guardians of the Galaxy promises the kind of irreverent disdain for blockbuster norms that founded the Marvel Studios juggernaut, way back when they handed the reins to Mr. Favreau and Mr. Downey Jr. It features an unapologetically weird crew of intergalactic outlaws – green-skinned princesses and rocket-wielding raccoons – in an unapologetically weird universe mined…
Lucy is a deliriously unhinged future cult-classic, a joyously overstuffed treatise on the Meaning Of Life scrawled in Comic Sans and rendered in a vivid mélange of gunfights, car chases and stock footage. Its frankly ridiculous concept – Local Woman Uses More Than 10% Of Her Brain – could have easily produced an enjoyably daft…
“Even people who have never encountered snow can imagine what it’s like to walk through it. You leave footprints – declivities. When you step on fresh snow, you pack it down. You pack it down onto the sidewalk and when all the loose snow later blows away, it actually leaves a positive record of that…
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