Studio Ghibli’s Isao Takahata’s adaptation of the ancient folk tale “The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter” is rendered in gorgeous hand-drawn animation that recalls both a children’s picture book and Japanese woodcuttings. This aesthetic and the title suggest the film’s shift in focus – rather than telling the story of the bamboo cutter who finds…
There are very few nerdy activities I haven’t partaken in at some point. I’ve played Dungeons and Dragons. I’ve beaten the Queensland State Champion at Scrabble. I’ve assembled and painted two Warhammer 40,000 armies. I’ve written Neon Genesis Evangelion fan fiction. I’ve played pretty much every prominent collectible card game you can name – Pokémon,…
The nation-centric film festivals that flit their way through Australian capitals tend to offer the same sort of fare, for better or worse: a mix of arthouse indies, accessible comedies and the occasional crime drama. As a horror/thriller film, Shrew’s Nest is an outlier in the 2015 Spanish Film Festival lineup. Directors Juanfer Andrés and…
Most conventional horror films fall somewhere on the sadomasochistic continuum. They either allow the audience to assume the role of sadist, monitoring the physical and psychological torment of the film’s protagonists like Jigsaw peering through his surveillance cameras, or manoeuvre viewers into enduring the victims’ ordeals, much like a masochist cherishing their punishment. While I…
Spirited Away is not my favourite of Hayao Miyazaki’s films – that title goes to My Neighbour Totoro, now and forever – but it is perhaps his best. The story told here is deeply steeped in Japanese mythology yet imbued with resonant universality. As a child, who hasn’t fretted at being abandoned by their parents,…
Avengers: Age of Ultron is, for better or worse, the culmination of Marvel Studios’ approach to commercial cinema. By this stage, their much-discussed directorial departures – Patty Jenkins from Thor: The Dark World, Edgar Wright from Ant-Man – and the homogeneity of their output make it clear that this is about as far from auteurist…
You probably heard about Banksy’s New York “residency” a year-and-a-half ago. An unassuming old man selling Banksy stencils – worth tens of thousands dollars at least – for a few bucks on the side of the street. The story about the locals charging people to view his graffito. “The response to it would be part…
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…
Elijah Wood sure has slipped comfortably into B-movies after his stint at the Shire, hasn’t he? When I first stumbled upon Open Windows, I was expecting something along the lines of Wood’s bomb-in-a-piano thriller Grand Piano. There are similarities: both films are quintessential B-thrillers, escalating a catchy premise into something tense (and a little silly).…
The story told in The Green Prince is an astonishing one. Nadav Schirman’s documentary unfolds like a great John le Carré novel, threading its way through the twists and turns that bind two men on opposite sides of the Israel/Palestine conflict. One is Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of a prominent Hamas cleric, who spent…
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