Joy (2015)

Watching David O. Russell’s Joy is akin to watching his career: abundant potential dribbling sadly away. The first half hour or so of the film, a biopic of Joy Mangano, Miracle Mop inventor (Jennifer Lawrence), takes the kind of stuff usually brushed over in these films – the anxieties of running household, familial tensions, financial…

BAPFF: Atomic Heart (2015)

If Iranian cinema has a home, it’s the automobile. Like Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry and Ten, Jafar Panahi’s Tehran Taxi, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad’s Tales, Ali Ahmadzade’s Atomic Heart is a road movie without any particular destination in mind, drifting idly through Tehran’s twilight streets, through conversations about atomic mothers and dormant dictators. But where those…

BAPFF: Force of Destiny (2015)

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…

The Past is Unwrapped in Joel Edgerton’s The Gift

The Gift opens on ominous shots of an abandoned, modernist mansion, grey stone and brown wood gleaming dully in the afternoon L.A. sun. Soon, Simon (Jason Bateman) and Robyn (Rebecca Hall), a professional couple from Chicago, will be escorted through the hollow house by a real estate agent. But for now it lies dormant, the…

Queensland Film Festival Announced

The demise of the Brisbane International Film Festival left a vacuum in Brisbane’s cinematic culture. Thankfully, nature and cinephiles alike abhor vacuums, and events like GOMA’s Lynch exhibition, the Brisbane Asia Pacific Film Festival and, now, John Edmond and Huw Walmsley-Evans’ Queensland Film Festival have rushed to fill the void. As much as I enjoyed…

The 500 Cast Episode 3: Suffocating Rubber Clown Suit Edition

In this monthly podcast, we usually round up 500 Club writers for a lively discussion of contentious new releases, emerging trends and issues in movies, and relevant cinematic goings-on in Brisbane and broader areas. For our third episode, however, we’ve ditched our regular schedule in favour of waxing lyrical about all things David Lynch, ahead of…

Jupiter Ascending (2015)

You don’t have to be an aficionado of science fiction to recognise that the Wachowski’s latest production, Jupiter Ascending, draws inspiration from countless sci-fi forebears. Oh, sure, it’s an “original” property, but as with the Wachowskis’ output from The Matrix and beyond, it’s an unabashed pastiche. Jupiter Ascending’s setting is classic space opera, galaxies ruled…