Trust Denis Villeneuve to take what could have been a fairly conventional drug war thriller and transform it into a hollowed-out horror movie. His latest film, Sicario is, at its core, a scathing indictment of modern American patriarchy. He pulled a similar trick with 2013’s underrated Prisoners, realising an unapologetically pulpy script as a deeply…
I remember a time. A special time, when around every corner was another secret waiting to be discovered, another story to be told. It was a time that could never end. Of course it did end. We grew up. Reality intertwined our perception and the tales we’d created faded into insignificance. Pan asks us to…
“You’re telling me we lost our president like we… lost a set of car keys. This is the most powerful nation in the history of the planet. This is America, and as Vice President of this great nation, I am commanding you to sort this shit out.” That quote gives you a good indication of…
Not long after M. Night Shyamalan’s Sixth Sense opened in 1999, my parents dragged my brother along to the theatre to watch it because “we had to see it.” They’d seen it already, of course, and I suspect their second visit was as much motivated by analysing the construction of the film’s famous twist as…
Michael Winterbottom’s fictionalised account of the Amanda Knox trial appears to present its mission statement early on, with Kate Beckinsale explaining, “You can’t tell the truth unless you make it a fiction.” Unfortunately, The Face of an Angel – which turns out, in fact, to be a a fictional film about the making of a…
Is it weird that cinema is almost entirely absent realistic presentations of office politics? Don’t expect Office, an office-drama-comedy-romance-musical from Hong Kong director Johnnie To to buck that trend. Realism is almost entirely avoided in this tale of ambition, set in the heady times of pre-GFC 2007 and staged on an abstract, artificial, gorgeous set…
At the centre of Satoshi Kon’s final film, Paprika, is a parade like no other. Woven from dream fabric, a colourful melange of animated household items, frogs, pachinko robots and a dizzying array of additional miscellaneous figures – including the Statue of Liberty – sway and frolic through an inchoate dream city. The cavalcade of…
What would it be like to summit Mount Everest? Even in this post-Hillary, commercialised world, where the opportunity is there for anyone of sufficient physical capabilities (not to mention a hefty bank balance), a mythical halo still engulfs the Tallest Mountain On Earth. I have a sneaking suspicion it’d be deeply disappointing. Not necessarily the experience…
Haemoo – South Korean for “sea fog” – is a deceptive film; despite initially presenting itself as a people-smuggling drama, loosely based on a 2001 real-life tragedy, it’s in fact smuggling a carefully-crafted tragicomic thriller. The initial framing of its smuggler protagonists as desperate souls soon gives way to overt, melodramatic villainy – rape, violence…
So it turns out I’m not much of an Alex Ross Perry fan. I watched Listen Up Philip, Perry’s third feature, with high expectations. I’d heard positive things about this intelligent indie film, and its cast – Elisabeth Moss, Krysten Ritter, Jonathan Pryce and Jason Schwartzman as the titular Philip, a self-obsessed semi-successful New York…
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