Everyone seems to love Jurassic World. It’s earned a respectable seventy-so percent on Rotten Tomatoes, that famously flawless barometer of taste, and pretty much everyone I’ve chatted to about the film thoroughly enjoyed the experience. Everyone seems to love the film; everyone except precisely every film critic I’ve spoken to about it. My conversations –…
This week marks the 40th anniversary of Peter Weir’s seminal Australian New Wave film Picnic at Hanging Rock. As part of my series of “cheat sheets” on films taught in secondary schools, unpacking their themes and detailing related texts, I examined the film for SBS Movies. Check it out via the link below! Read Picnic at Hanging Rock: Cheat…
Over at FilmInk I reviewed three films from the upcoming Korean Film Festival in Australia: the entirely decent comedy-action-thriller A Hard Day; the surprisingly spiky rom-com-that-isn’t, My Ordinary Love Story and the epic boats-on-boats war film The Admiral: Roaring Currents (also out on DVD and Blu-Ray). My Ordinary Love Story is definitely the pick of…
Tom Cruise is one of this generation’s most enduring movie stars. In 1986, he piloted Top Gun to the top of the box office; three decades later, well into his fifties, he launches the fifth instalment of the Mission: Impossible franchise while his Top Gun contemporaries have faded into irrelevance (or television). So what is…
David Oelhoffen’s adaptation of The Guest, a short story by Albert Camus, expands the story’s scope beyond Camus’ single schoolroom setting to the desolate wilderness of the Algerian steppes. French film Far From Men fleshes out its source’s narrative by adopting Western tropes like tense standoffs erupting into gunfire while retaining its stark moral conflict.…
What is the purpose of an international film festival? This is a tricky question, with many answers. It’s a question I’m not particularly qualified to answer, either, but as I see it, the primary responsibility of a film festival is to provide an opportunity for cinephiles to see films that they otherwise might not –…
Let me get this out of the way first: Trainwreck is a very good film. That needs to be said upfront, because this one of those reviews where I’m going to spend more time talking about what didn’t work rather than what did, and that imbalance might suggest that I didn’t enjoy the film. But…
French queer drama Eastern Boys is constructed from four vignettes, each revolving around the titular group of illegal immigrants under the thumb of a charismatic leader dubbed “Boss” (Danill Vorobyov, whose performance is the best thing about the film). They spend their days loitering idly in train stations or hotels while dabbling in theft and…
German director Oliver Hirschbiegel is likely best known to Australian audiences for helming Downfall (2004), a drama about Adolf Hitler’s final days that earned an Academy Award nomination and hundreds of YouTube memes. Thursday sees the release of his latest film, 13 Minutes, which returns to the subject matter of the Third Reich. The film’s…
You’d need a heart of stone to grow up in the ‘90s and come out without some environmentalist tendencies. You’d go to the movies and watch as cute rainforest animals had their home imperilled by oncoming bulldozers (in Fern Gully: The Last Rainforest) or cringe at the cruelty inflicted upon an innocent orca (in Free…
ccpopculture 