Winchester (2018)
Executed with the Spierigs’ trademark cheap competence (these boys really pump them out), there’s nothing to distinguish Winchester from its haunted house forebears.
The Dressmaker (2015)
The Dressmaker follows Myrtle Dunnage (Kate Winslet), returning from Paris to the town she grew up in, where her mother “Mad Molly” (Judy Davis) has all but lost her memory. She has to face the realisation that she may have murdered a young boy as a child, and even though she does not recall the…
Holding the Man: Love Meets Tragedy in 1980s Australia
Opening your tragic love story with a re-enactment of Romeo and Juliet is a bold move, but it’s the kind of decision that neatly encapsulates the strengths – and weaknesses – of Holding the Man, Neil Armfield and Tommy Murphy’s film adaptation of Timothy Conigrave’s memoir. This is a film that unashamedly tilts for the…
Predestination (2014)
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.…
These Final Hours (2013)
Puzzle pieces lie strewn across a dusty table in the suburbs of Perth. They form an incomplete geography: crude continents assembled from matching pieces surrounded by isolate islands, shards without a partner. The camera lingers on this puzzle; we know it will never be completed. There are mere hours til the immolating shockwave of an…
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