Death seems to consume the small Irish town of County Sligo. The blue-grey ocean that borders its pallid beaches stretches to infinity. Waves crash against the black, rectangular rocks that reach out hopelessly like deific digits, long-forgotten obsidian coffins. An immense mesa looms in the distance, resembling a church’s altar or, perhaps, a tomb. Calvary…
Jersey Boys is based on the hugely successful Broadway musical telling the story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, but it isn’t exactly a musical – if we disregard the weirdly incongruous musical number that plays over the credits, anyway. Musical biopic would be a better description, as we follow the career of Frankie…
“Why can’t I be Frank?” That’s the question that comes to hang over milquetoast, mediocre keyboard player Jon (Domhnall Gleeson), just as the sullen mannequin-fucker Don (Scoot McNairy) predicted it would. The Frank in question is played by Michael Fassbender, though you’ll have to take my word for this, as he spends the majority of…
22 Jump Street is the kind of sequel you get from people who hate sequels. That’s not an entirely bad thing. This is the first sequel Hollywood wunderkinds Chris Lord and Phil Miller have helmed, though not the first they’ve inspired: they fobbed off Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 to Cody Cameron and…
There’s something intoxicating about the thrill of a perfect musical moment. When you hear that song – whether it’s on the radio, on the record, or on the stage – and there’s this transcendent surge as you’re transported somewhere else. Perhaps that rare electricity was coursing through legendary DJ John Peel’s veins when he famously…
The Two Faces of January is set in 1962, but it could just have easily been made in the same year, or even a decade earlier. The film – from Drive screenwriter Hossein Amini – is a close facsimile of the thrillers of half a century ago, to the point where it could be a…
2014’s Sydney Film Festival was only my second film festival (after last year’s Brisbane International Film Festival) and my first time travelling to attend a festival. All told I caught eleven films over a long weekend, and had an excellent time, thanks to so much more than those films (though I remain jealous of anyone…
The first How to Train Your Dragon was a special kind of miracle. A simple tale of a father and his son, of a boy and his dragon, it soared beyond its modest ambitions. HTTYD succeeded thanks to gorgeously composed and edited animation and a spectacular Oscar-nominated score, yes, but mostly because of the simplicity…
The Essential‘s The World on War is a monthly feature where “we travel around the globe and investigate how armed conflict influences a country’s popular culture and its representation of war in film.” My contribution to this feature was an analysis of Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped as an embodiment of the fear and faith…
When I was growing up, I used to imagine that I was the star in my own movie. That my adventures on the playground or walks home from school were shadowed by an unseen camera crew, recording my every experience for an enraptured audience. While the idea was ridiculous in its egotism – who would…
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