Truman’s tone is set from its opening scene. Telling the tale of a long-term friendship between two men, Julián (Ricardo Darín) and Tomás (Javier Cámara), tested by the former’s terminal illness, it begins by chronicling the banal vagaries of Tomás’ lengthy transit from his home in Canada to Madrid, Spain. The weariness of Tomás’s journey…
It’s been a while since I’ve gone to a cinema and done nothing but laugh for 90 minutes. Was this because laughter surround me from beginning to end? Or was it that Bad Neighbours 2 was simply a well-written comedy? You can judge for yourself but in my opinion the sequel surpassed the original in many…
Are you in the mood for cutting edge military surveillance, white-knuckle tension and political intrigue? Then welcome to the best war film since 2009’s Hurt Locker. The plot interconnects disparate players, including politicians, generals and drone pilots in a mission to eliminate a terrorist cell in Kenya. With an insightful look into modern military tactics,…
I’m a city boy at heart, but I’ve spent much of my formative years in country towns big and small. In Ararat – a Victorian town best known for being ‘the fattest town in Australia’ – I had friends and family on farms down the road. Toowoomba, where I spent my late school years, was…
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…
You’d expect Marvel to be running out of steam by now, but this latest offering confounds expectations. Captain America: Civil War brandishes the series’ signature eye-popping visual spectacle in a package that skimps on neither heart nor wit. This is the best MCU film since the original Iron-Man. The screenwriters have managed to succeed in two key areas…
A boy’s best friend is his mother. Not exempt is 50-something real estate flunkey, Frank Mollard (Anthony LaPaglia), who struggles to come to terms with the death of his biological mum. But fate intervenes in the shape of ‘surrogate mother’, Sarah (Julia Blake) who offers him friendship and closure. Sundays proves a decent contemplation of…
Mississippi Grind draws from the archetypes of the gambling and the road movie, finding the rough-edged redolence of a gambler’s existence. We follow a pair of gambling tragics – or perhaps addict is the right word – Ben Mendehlson’s world-weary Gerry (like “Lewis”) and Ryan Reynolds’ mouthy Curtis (like “Mayfield”). Each becomes intertwined in the…
Every now and again, I find myself drawn to films not for any particular artistic or narrative merit, but simply because I’m for an evocation of a mood and place. With an extended European holiday on the horizon, Isla Bonita certainly scratches the itch of idle European tranquillity, set pretty well entirely on the –…
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…
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