There’s a world in which Dirty Grandpa is a great, if lowbrow, comedy. Robert De Niro is perfectly suited to the eponymous role of smutty senior; he’s always been convincing at improvisational comedy (look at Mean Streets, or even Goodfellas) plus you buy him as someone who can still pull off one-armed push ups. Oh,…
“Where are you going!?” “Nowhere.” Australian director Sue Brooks takes a prismatic approach to Looking for Grace, a tale of family, infidelity and theft told from a variety of perspectives. It’s not quite Rashomon, though. Fractured, non-linear narratives rely on the strength of their individual storylines as well as the whole, whether aiming for ‘everything’s…
Tom Hooper might’ve made a great painter. Like the protagonists of his latest film, Lili Elbe (Eddie Redmayne) and Gerda Wegener (Alicia Vikander), he has an eye for colour and composition that produces some memorable images. But cinema is about more than striking individual images; it’s about, among many other things, how images combine and…
I really wanted to like this film. Alas, Ron Howard (usually ‘Mr Dependable’ in the director’s chair) has guided this big-budget seafaring adventure straight onto the reef. In the Heart of the Sea is ambitious but fails to develop its own identity, instead playing out like a highlight reel from better movies. The film is based on…
There’s a germ of a good idea in Man Up, a disappointing rom-com starring Simon Pegg and Lake Bell. It’s the idea of its characters as “emotional jigsaws” – dating in their mid-30s/early-40s while burdened by the baggage of failed relationships. In Man Up’s world, the challenges of dating aren’t so much associated with finding…
Full disclosure: I know essentially nothing about fashion, and literally nothing about haute couture fashion. My knowledge of Christian Dior comes entirely from hip-hop lyrics, and it turns out that puts me squarely outside the target audience for Frédéric Tcheng’s fashion doco Dior and I. If you’re the kind of person who understands words like…
It’s pretty hard to go about making a film about Whitey Bulger, because how do you make it not like every other sub-Scorsese, heated-up-bullshit gangster movie? All the basic elements of the Whitey Bulger story – corrupt feds, brother on the other side of the law, paranoiac crime lord – are well-worn clichés in the…
Introducing the Queensland premiere of his latest film – from a career that stretches over more than 20 features – Paul Cox began by thanking his anonymous donor. Force of Destiny, you see, is inspired by Cox’s own experience with liver cancer and a last-minute, live-saving liver transplant, which might be why David Stratton described it…
Here are the things to like about American Ultra: Kristen Stewart’s performance as a put-upon girlfriend. She’s fantastic, as always. The chemistry between Stewart and on-screen boyfriend Jesse Eisenberg, playing a kind of Cheech-and-Bourne stoner/super-soldier mashup. Some imaginative use of neon/black light colours. …and that’s it, sadly. American Ultra could have been a funny, energetic…
She’s Funny That Way, the new comedy from famed New York director Peter Bogdanovich, is achingly inauthentic from start to finish. In part, that’s a reflection of its inception as a refurbished script from last millennium dusted off for a contemporary setting. This explains why, in 2015, a part-time call girl (Imogen Poots) still takes…
ccpopculture 