Accessibility and Culture in Hunt for the Wilderpeople

New Zealand writer-director-actor Taika Waititi has always had a quirky comedic streak. With his latest, Hunt for the Wilderpeople, he’s closest to a defining style that can easily translate across a variety of audiences. That might be why he’s been selected to helm the next instalment of Marvel’s Thor franchise. His first feature film Eagle…

BAPFF Melodrama: Early Winter, The Daughter and Floating Clouds

I had a melodramatic couple of days at the Brisbane Asia Pacific Film Festival. Starting with Michael Rowe’s Canadian/Australian drama Early Winter, through Simon Stone’s The Daughter and concluding with a retrospective screening of Mikio Naruse’s classic Floating Clouds, my weekend was dominated by the infidelities and dark secrets that define the much-maligned genre of…

A Long Way Down (2014)

A Long Way Down begins with a potentially promising premise before it falls, well, you know, <gestures vaguely towards title>. For a film that opens with a suicidal quartet meeting atop a London skyscraper on New Year’s Eve, it demonstrates little actual interest in examining suicide, despites its half-hearted feints at undergraduate psychology. Instead A…