My expectations for Run All Night were probably set higher than your average punter. It’s not that I’m a big proponent of the ubiquitous Liam-Neeson-Is-An-Alcoholic-Who-Shoots-People pseudo-franchise of the last decade or so – I couldn’t bring myself to watch Taken 3 – but that I was simply excited to see another picture from director Jaume…
Particle Fever takes a notoriously inaccessible topic – particle physics and the search for the Higgs boson – and makes it as accessible as possible. Explanations of the Large Hadron Collider, the conflict between models like super-symmetry and the multiverse model and the statistical significance necessary to identify said boson are conveyed with direct explanations…
There’s a lot to like about In Bloom, Georgia’s submission for Best Foreign Language Film in last year’s Academy Awards. The storyline pairs the small-scale coming of age story of two girls, Eka (Lika Babluani) and Natia (Mariam Bokeria), with a nuanced interrogation of power in the midst of Georgia’s 1992 civil war. Directors Nana…
Kwaidan probably deserves a higher rating than the three stars I’ve given it here; I watched this at GOMA’s Myths and Legends screening (it was the ~160 min European cut, not the 183 minute cut they advertised) in the middle of a busy week and spent the majority of the film drifting in and out…
Stephen Hawking is the perfect movie subject. He’s a world-famous physicist. He’s charming and funny. And he defied the odds to turn his motor neurone disease diagnosis – and the accompanying average life expectancy of two years – into fifty years of success. That probably explains why The Theory of Everything is, by my count,…
Night Moves mostly slipped under the radar in 2014. Despite the presence of Jesse Eisenberg, Dakota Fanning and Peter Sarsgaard and a marketable premise – an ecoterrorism procedural – it attracted little buzz and didn’t even receive a proper release in Brisbane (though I should acknowledge that the always-excellent Schonell Theatre screened it sometime after…
In the mid 90s, Cheryl Strayed hiked over a thousand miles along the Pacific Crest Trail. Her book, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, published in 2012, described both the challenges of her external journey and the traumas that drove her to the trek: her mother’s death, her divorce, her drug…
One of the unfortunate consequences of Australia’s long-delayed exposure to Oscar contenders is that the critical narrative around these films has coalesced long before they screen here. So it is with Still Alice, which the majority of critics have described as some variation of overly sentimental Alzheimer’s weepy that will win Julianne Moore the Oscar.…
Illmatic is one of those rare texts to have established itself as a classic within two decades of its release; it’s a hip-hop touchstone and unquestionably one of the greatest records ever released. It’s understandable, then, that Nas: Time is Illmatic, One9’s documentary of both the artist and the album, takes an uncontroversial, conventional approach…
Elmore Leonard is one of those authors that you can be familiar with having not read a single page of his writing. This is thanks to the numerous cinematic adaptations of his work – whether its Jackie Brown, Get Shorty, Out of Sight or, now, Life of Crime. Daniel Schechter’s film has plenty of familiar…
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