Creep isn’t so much a movie as a goof, an 82 minute micro-budget riff on Mark Duplass’s inflated New Age persona (as in seen in the likes of The Mindy Project). Despite assuming a found-footage horror genre, the film isn’t especially scary or suspenseful; despite the title, Duplass’ character, “Joseph”, isn’t so much pathologically creepy…
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…
The title of 13 Minutes is a reference to the slim margin of time that could’ve made all the difference in World War II; had musician Georg Elser’s handmade bomb gone off thirteen minutes earlier, and killed Adolf Hitler. Frontloading Elser’s (Christian Friedel’s) failure suits the film’s approach, which examines both the aftermath of his…
The opening minutes of Paper Towns, the latest instalment in the John Green Cinematic Universe, aren’t especially promising. Our middle-class white teenage protagonist explains, in faux-profound seriousness, that “everyone gets a miracle.” Maybe you win the lottery, maybe you “marry the Queen of England.” Said middle-class white teenager, Quentin (Nat Wolff), has already found his…
It’s hard to fault the craft behind this live action adaptation of iconic Japanese gentleman thief; it is nothing if not competent. It looks very professional, with a sleek, slickly colour-graded aesthetic that resembles an up-scale watch or automobile advertisement. The action scenes – of which there more than a few – are crisply edited…
I spent so long trying to untangle the allegorical and psychological underpinning of Christian Petzold’s post-Holocaust drama, Phoenix, that it took me a while to recognise how profoundly unmoved it left me. It’s not that I couldn’t embrace its implausible premise – where a concentration camp survivor (Nina Hoss) returns to her husband (Ronald Zehrfeld)…
The word ‘naturalistic’ has very particular connotations when used to describe cinema. Handheld camera, loose compositions, deliberately-muddled foley; that sort of thing. However May in the Summer’s naturalism bears none of these characteristics. When May (Cherien Dabas, writer and director besides) returns to her home country of Jordan shortly before her wedding, the conversations she…
I must confess I know essentially nothing about Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. What I do know is gleaned pretty much entirely from this film, in which elderly baker Martin (Fabrice Luchini) becomes convinced that his new neighbour, Gemma (Gemma Arterton), is reliving Madame Bovary’s tragic character arc (specifically: sleeping with some dudes and then committing…
There are two Pitch Perfects in Pitch Perfect 2. The first Pitch Perfect is pretty much the Pitch Perfect you’d expect – the first one all over again. This Pitch Perfect takes the Ghostbusters approach to sequels, by repeating all the same beats and bits note for note. All female a capella group the Barden…
The nation-centric film festivals that flit their way through Australian capitals tend to offer the same sort of fare, for better or worse: a mix of arthouse indies, accessible comedies and the occasional crime drama. As a horror/thriller film, Shrew’s Nest is an outlier in the 2015 Spanish Film Festival lineup. Directors Juanfer Andrés and…
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