My earliest memories of Hot Chip are on the dancefloor. The place was Common People, circa mid-2000s. It was a scungy Brisbane nightclub for hipsters before that term had become the nebulous pejorative it is nowadays, the descendant of the Depot and the ancestor of a string of replacements (Gossip, Magazine, others). Common People only…
Why shouldn’t James Bond be played by Melissa McCarthy? Walking out of Spy, the latest film from Paul Feig – of Bridesmaids and The Heat – I couldn’t think of a convincing reason why not. The film is an uneven but enjoyable comedy. After a flabby opening act – weighed down both by an insistence…
The Salvation reminded me of Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns. Not, I should hasten to add, because it approaches the mastery of Leone’s films, but rather in the way a foreign filmmaker (director Kristian Levring is Danish) approaches an acutely American genre from a unique perspective. There are some Leone similarities in how Levring’s screenplay (co-written…
Mad Max: Fury Road isn’t going to change your life. It’s probably not necessary to clarify that, but I thought it was worth noting in the wake of the torrent of #MadMadFuryRoad hype and hyperbole that has consumed Twitter regarding George Miller’s long-(long)-awaited follow-up to his original Mad Max trilogy. Believe the hype, but don’t…
The story told in Dinosaur 13 is perfectly suited to a feature-length documentary, featuring enough dramatic twists and turns to sustain 90-plus minutes with little padding. A complete T-Rex skeleton – “the most important paleontological find of all time” – is discovered by a group of scientists, but initial euphoria is overwhelmed when the skeleton…
There’s an unrealistic expectation around film criticism that critics should approach every film from an objective perspective, regardless of its genre or subject matter. No doubt there are critics out there who love every kind of film equally, but most of us have some kind of bias. That’s only really a problem if reviewers are…
Once-spidermonkey Kristen Stewart has swiftly escaped the confines of franchise cinema to prove herself one of the most promising young actresses of her generation. Her sullenness – relentlessly mocked by the tabloid press when she was at the centre of pre-teen Twilight attention – has become an asset in the subsequent years; as a performer,…
Alex Garland’s Ex Machina is one of those films that’s going to provoke a lot of questions whether you like or dislike it. I was mostly in the “like” camp – giving it 3.5 stars and generally praising its merits in my review for The Essential – but this instalment isn’t going to be so…
Brett Morgen, the director of documentary Cobain: Montage of Heck, possesses two advantages few documentarians have. The first is that his subject – Nirvana lead singer Kurt Cobain – has become such a cultural icon that there’s no need for him to rehash the broad details of his life story. The second is his unprecedented…
Alex Garland’s work as a novelist (The Beach, Coma) and screenwriter (28 Days Later, Sunshine) is, at its best, defined by a careful command of tone balanced with obvious intelligence. It should not come as a surprise that Ex Machina, Garland’s first time behind the director’s chair, demonstrates these qualities in abundance. This sparse sci-fi…
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