Awards Season, Reviews / 28.10.2019

Sometimes, a movie star disappears, never to be heard from again. Occasionally, it's more an extended break before a stellar comeback performance to put them right back on the map. We've seen that once already this year, with Renée Zellweger making a roaring return in Judy. Now it's time for the glorious resurrection of Eddie Murphy, in a performance that's the best thing he's offered in more than a decade. After a string of disastrous failures which led to four (!) Razzie Award nominations in just six (!!) years,...

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Reviews / 27.10.2019

Australian cinema loves a good wedding. But, in a case of unfortunate timing, 2019 has already served up one gorgeously romantic trip down the aisle with Top End Wedding. By virtue of unavoidable comparison, writer/director Nick Conidi's debut feature film Promised can't quite match the finesse and style of its cinematic marital-themed compatriot. While the film is undoubtedly a passion project for Conidi and seeks to capture a fascinating moment in our history where tradition and revolution worked furiously against each other, Promised fails to fully explore the Australian immigrant...

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Reviews / 22.10.2019

Eat the rich seems to be a recurring theme of cinema this year. After Parasite blew everyone's damn socks off with its acerbic takedown of class warfare, Joker made an earnest but messy attempt to craft something similar, and the misguided conservative backlash against The Hunt caused Universal Pictures to unceremoniously shelve the film indefinitely, we're offered up a piece of cinema with an anti-elitist message as subtle as a crossbow to the chest. With its tongue firmly planted in its cheek, Ready or Not boldly declares rich people are batshit crazy...

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Reviews / 17.10.2019

Comedy sequels are rarely a great idea. Just think for a moment and try to summon a truly great comedy which delivered a follow-up that either matched or succeeded its predecessor. You're very likely to craft a list you could count on one hand. A brilliant comedy is really lightning in a bottle type cinema, meaning it's nigh-on impossible to replicate. But when a comedy goes gangbusters at the box office, the call to try it again with a sequel usually follow fairly quickly. In a rare case of...

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Reviews / 16.10.2019

Disney's monopolistic run on 2019's box office has rightfully taken a slight breather for the last few months. After dominating cinema returns from March to July, we've had a brief respite from their incredible (if not a little worrying) continuous string of blockbuster success stories unlike any in film history. Unsurprisingly, that pause is about to come to an end, as we venture into their third bombastic live-action adaptation for the year. Five years after giving one of their most beloved villains a re-imagining nobody really asked for, the...

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Awards Season, Reviews / 13.10.2019

Way back in 1996, Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet twisted a classic piece of Shakespeare's work into something palatable enough for mainstream audiences to lap up, particularly teenage girls currently fawning over a young Leonardo DiCaprio. Taking equal inspiration from a piece of Shakespeare and with this generation's teen dream Timothée Chalamet at its helm, David Michôd's The King might just unintentionally pull in a similar crowd. Whereas Luhrmann's work was a direct (albeit wildly unique) Shakespearean adaptation, The King blazes its own daring trail by leaving Shakespeare's infamous iambic pentameter behind,...

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Awards Season, Reviews / 04.10.2019

In all honesty, the sales pitch for The Aeronauts doesn't sound all that particularly enticing. Witness the daring 19th-century adventure of a mismatched British scientist and pilot, as they head off in a hot-air balloon to learn about weather prediction and break the world record for flight altitude. Sounds enthralling, right? But hold your horses. This impeccably crafted and surprisingly thrilling little gem is ultimately one of the year's biggest surprise packages. The reteaming of The Theory of Everything duo Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones proves the first time...

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Reviews / 01.10.2019

In a year where we're being offered not one, not two, but three (!) films starring varying digital creations of Will Smith, only one seeks to give you a double dose of the Fresh Prince within the same picture. Yes, it's finally time for the crazy clone film studio executives have been attempting to produce since 1997. Maybe they should have left this one in the 90s where it belonged. With a two-time Academy Award-winning director at the helm, an Academy Award-winning cinematographer behind the camera, and the use...

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Awards Season, Reviews / 29.09.2019

It's fairly shameful it's taken us this long for a biopic on a historical figure as important as Harriet Tubman. Practically every other key figure in the Civil War has been covered by cinema, yet not the abolitionist who still inspires people to this day. In fact, the only cinematic appearance of Tubman has been a blink-and-you'll-miss-her role in 2012's Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. Yep. That's her current cinematic legacy. The time has finally arrived for Tubman to have her moment on the big screen. Brought to life by...

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Awards Season, Reviews / 28.09.2019

Full disclosure - until last year, I had never heard of Fred Rogers. As someone living in the bubble that is Australia, the unassuming brilliance of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood had somehow never reached our shores. It took Morgan Neville's gorgeous and inspiring 2018 documentary Won't You Be My Neighbor? to introduce the magic of Mister Rogers to those of us previously uninitiated. After the documentary provided an intimate insight into both the public and private lives of Rogers, there seemed no need for a full-scale biopic. Thankfully, that's entirely...

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