The Dressmaker follows Myrtle Dunnage (Kate Winslet), returning from Paris to the town she grew up in, where her mother “Mad Molly” (Judy Davis) has all but lost her memory. She has to face the realisation that she may have murdered a young boy as a child, and even though she does not recall the…
Ride is a study in contrasts. The most obvious contrast is between its two settings. There’s the fast-paced New York in which the tale begins, where editor Jackie (Helen Hunt, who also wrote and directed the film) and her wannabe-writer son Angelo (Brenton Thwaites) bicker about punctuation over coffees. And then there’s sun-drenched Venice, California;…
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…
Maybe I’m not the audience for Entourage. I’ve seen very little of the show – snippets here and there of the later seasons that my wife forced herself to sit through, presumably out of completist compulsion. So I had no sense of good will towards movie star Vince (Adrian Grenier), his agent Ari Gold (Jeremy…
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…
Thanks to Madman Entertainment, ccpopculture has 3 copies of What We Do in the Shadows’ Fang-Bloody-Tastic Collector’s Edition (Blu-Ray/DVD) to give away. Here’s what I said to say about the vampire mockumentary in my review last year: “Despite building a 90-something minute film from over 100 hours of surplus footage, Waititi and Clement pull their…
Hollywood has never really known what to do with Chris Rock. That’s been increasingly apparent over the last decade or so, with the so-called “the funniest man in America” finding work as either a cartoon zebra in the Madagascar series or as Adam Sandler’s Friend in The Longest Yard, You Don’t Mess with the Zohan…
Remember the last low-brow comedy to centre on the attempted assassination of a world leader? I’m of course talking about Zoolander, where Ben Stiller’s empty-headed male model was brainwashed to murder the prime minister of Malaysia. Roger Ebert took issue with the subplot – “Didn’t it strike anybody connected with this movie that it was…
Aussie time-travel rom com The Infinite Man sits somewhere the middle of the triangle formed by Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Primer and, uh, Triangle. That’s a promising combination, and given my fondness for time-travel films, I had high expectations. They were not met. The film’s main problem is a lack of emotional authenticity.…
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