Awards Season, Reviews / 18.02.2022

Despite all the inroads of studios like Pixar, Disney, and Sony Pictures, feature-length animated films are still mostly considered a genre of cinema made for children. It's a moderately fair generalisation for a style of film that began as pure family entertainment. That's why it's always such a thrill to see a filmmaker utilise animation in a decidedly adult manner. A brilliant fusion of documentary filmmaking and striking animation to uniquely deliver a compelling true story, Flee is simply extraordinary. It's not just an exceptional documentary or an...

Awards Season, Reviews / 12.02.2022

A film that runs for three hours can be a test of endurance, especially if it's doing little to validate the need for such an extensive running time. In most cases, it's a textbook example of a director failing to grasp the concept of editing. Less can sometimes be more. Then a filmmaker like Ryûsuke Hamaguchi comes along and somehow three hours float by without one even noticing. Such is the case with Hamaguchi's Drive My Car. A perfectly paced and exquisitely crafted masterpiece, this is an astonishing...

Reviews / 10.02.2022

After watching films for the better part of three decades, one would think I'd have learned by now not to judge a book by its cover. I will freely admit to having the absolute lowest of expectations of Marry Me; the breezy new love story starring the oddball romantic pairing of Jennifer Lopez and Owen Wilson. On paper, nothing about Marry Me makes a lick of sense, particularly its utterly ludicrous premise and unexpected casting choices. Yet, despite all the odds, everything miraculously works remarkably well. Colour me entirely surprised...

Reviews / 08.02.2022

Way back in January 2020 (aka the good ol' days), Disney released a series of Asian-inspired posters to celebrate Chinese New Year and promote their entire slate of 2020 theatrical releases. You can see the irony, right? Just two months later, a virus originating from China would see that very release schedule completely wiped clean and every single title either dumped on Disney's streaming platform or postponed for 12-18 months. One film caught up in this chaos was Kenneth Branagh's Death on the Nile, but it was just...

Awards Season, Reviews / 03.02.2022

When a film becomes the early frontrunner for Best Picture, the mudslinging inevitably begins. Kenneth Branagh's Belfast saw glowing reactions after screening at the Telluride Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival. At the latter, it won the People's Choice Award - a trophy three of the last five Best Picture winners all scored. But if you peruse the tweets of the vocal members of Film Twitter, its possible victory in late March would be a travesty not seen since the much-maligned Green Book won in 2018. I completely...

Reviews / 02.02.2022

892 From Vietnam to Iraq, America's woeful treatment of its returning soldiers has always been a dark stain on the country's history. Co-writer/director Abi Damaris Corbin taps into America's systemic failure of veterans' affairs with a pertinent and important true story ripped straight from the headlines. Led by a powerhouse performance from John Boyega and a terrific ensemble cast, 892 is a tense thriller with a powerful narrative that's damaged by Corbin's melodramatic TV Movie of the Week direction. In the summer of 2017, Lance Cpl. Brian Brown-Easley (Boyega) walks into...

Reviews / 31.01.2022

After Yang Sci-fi is a genre of cinema that loves to explore the notion of what is to be human, especially when robots are involved. That notion is at the heart of Kogonada's tender and delicate After Yang; a beautifully crafted wonder that explores grief, loss, and love in a way that's entirely mesmerising. Elevated by a hypnotic score from ASKA, elegant production design by Alexandra Schaller, and Benjamin Loeb's gorgeous cinematography, its emotional core will quietly creep up on you and leave you rather breathless. Taking place somewhere in the...

Opinion, Reviews / 18.01.2022

Ah, 2021. The year that held such promise, yet ultimately ended up merely proving the old rule that the sequel is worse than the original. After 2020 served film lovers with nothing but cinema closures, release date delays, and endless hours watching movies on our televisions, 2021 gave us much of the same. Well, that's if you were unlucky enough to live in certain parts of Australia where theatres sat dark from June to October. That meant we were forced to sit at home while major films like...

Reviews / 13.01.2022

The year was 1997 and a young pre-teen boy was sitting on the family couch, cowering under a blanket after witnessing the sight of Drew Barrymore's disembowelled body hanging from a tree. 25 years later and the opening of Wes Craven's Scream still has the power to completely take my breath away. You likely don't need me to explain how that unassuming masterpiece changed the very face of the horror genre. Calling it a gamechanger is an understatement. For better or worse, it revitalised the slasher subgenre and...

Awards Season, Reviews / 27.12.2021

Absolute power corrupts absolutely and there are few texts in literary history that finer exemplify this statement than William Shakespeare's Macbeth. From Orson Welles and Roman Polanski to Geoffrey Wright and Justin Kurzel, Shakespeare's epic tale of ambition, fate, and witchcraft has seen its fair share of cinematic adaptations over the years. In 2021, we are gifted perhaps the finest interpretation yet. In his solo directorial debut, writer-director Joel Coen strips back Shakespeare's "Scottish play" to focus on the text's darker elements to create one of the most breathtaking...

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