If you’re anything like me, you’re tired of reading about Boyhood by now, and the film hasn’t even come out in Australia (it’s released tomorrow). There were the months of pre-release hype as the rumoured-Linklater-twelve-project became an actual thing being released. There was the tsunami of hyperbolic reviews – coming in progressive waves as it…
The observational mode of Mike Leigh’s storytelling in Secrets & Lies did not initially impress me. Leigh tends to stand back from his characters; his camera maintains a close proximity to working-class mother Cynthia (Oscar-nominated Brenda Blethyn), her brother Maurice (Timothy Spall) and Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), the daughter Cynthia gave away decades ago …but generally…
I finally watched The Sacrament after watching Ti West’s featurette on the Criterion House release, where he articulately advocated for art-horror films that are “challenging films.” Ti West’s prior films – well, The House of the Devil and The Innkeepers, anyway – weren’t for everyone, but they were interesting – and, in my book, quality…
Your enjoyment of The Grand Seduction is entirely dependent on having a healthy suspension of disbelief and a broad tolerance for the rom-com formula – if you’re in possession of both those qualities, then you’ll likely have a good time with the film. Starring Brendan Gleeson as the mayor of a sparsely populated Canadian harbour…
As a teenager, I would’ve loved the Spierig Brothers’ time travel thriller Predestination; over a decade later, I’m not as enamoured of its conceptual ambition. The film sees Ethan Hawke and Sarah Snook dart and swerve through an entwined net of plot twists taken from a conceptual short story (“All You Zombies”) by Robert Heinlein.…
Australian cop flick Felony opens with a perfunctory action scene – the only scene in the film that fits that description. Detective Malcolm Toohey (Joel Edgerton, star and screenwriter) gives chase to a crim fleeing the scene, and earns a deposit of lead in his bulletproof vest for his trouble. Struggling to his feet, he…
Within the rusted, mud-splattered framework of William Friedkin’s Sorcerer is a distillation of 1970s American cinema. It has the bruised masculinity of Taxi Driver, the abiding pessimism of Chinatown and the nightmarish madness that would send Coppola deep into the jungles of the Philippines for Apocalypse Now. It’s fitting that its release would be eclipsed…
There’s a conspiratorial tenor to the discourse about Charlie McDowell’s The One I Love, as critics are driven to conniptions contemplating how to discuss the film’s concept. A quarter hour into The One I Love, the rug is pulled from under you as a secluded couple’s getaway – that troubled spouses Mark Duplass and Elisabeth…
The 2014 Israeli Film Festival kicks off tonight in Brisbane and Melbourne, with screenings in other Australian capitals to follow. With the Gaza situation plastered all over the news recently, it’s certainly a difficult time to promote a film festival celebrating the work from a country engaged in such devastating warfare (with questionable tactics, to…
There’s no reason Nurse 3-D couldn’t have worked. A bloody mixture of sex-negative horror, nurse sexploitation and American Psycho sounds like it should be an interesting mess. Instead Nurse 3-D is just bloody terrible, a Frankenstein’s monster lurching awkwardly through the detritus of better B-movies, assembling the occasional “so-bad-it’s-good” moment within its remarkably tedious eighty-four…
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