This morning the makers of the acclaimed feature Son of Babylon alerted Crikey to the news that they sent numerous requests to the Melbourne International Film Festival asking for the film be removed from the festival program. The filmmakers strongly object to MIFF’s links with the State of Israel, which is one of the festival’s [...]
This hilarious political documentary follows a trio of supposed performance artists who travel to North Korea to put on a deliberately terrible comedy show, only to have the Koreans reconstruct it from the ground up and use it for political purposes. Aviator-clad Danish director Mads Brügger observes early on that just as the North Koreans [...]
It is virtually impossible not to use words like “restrained” to describe Robin Williams’s mild-mannered performance in The World’s Greatest Dad, a superb jet black indie comedy from writer/director Bobcat Goldthwait. The reason is obvious: for decades Williams has been the bouncy flibbertigibbet, the elastic-faced crazy-eyed man flogging his own distinct brand of manic cheerfulness. [...]
Selecting an opening night feature for a major film festival should be like arranging to drop a bomb on the audience, but in a good way: get the crowd running, screaming and hollering as they leave the cinema, get tongues wagging and palms sweaty and pants wet, proverbially or otherwise, get them feverishly anticipating what [...]
It’s always tempting to look back through the haze of nostalgia and remember things to be better than they really were – the neighbourhood you used to live in, the house you grew up in, the quality and flavour of the lollies you munched on as a child – but in terms of original big [...]
To mark the theatrical release of director Richard Loncraine’s political drama The Special Relationship, starring Michael Sheen as Tony Blair and Dennis Quaid as Bill Clinton, Cinetology gives Melbourne readers the chance to win one of 15 double passes to a special preview screening of the film at Cinema Nova on Tuesday 27 July at [...]
What to make of the pasty-faced twerps from Twilight, the bland pop culture pea brains who bear more in common with K Mart models and Mills and Boon protagonists than purebred vampires of the “I vant to sark your blood” variety? What mixture of words can articulate the cultural relevance or lack thereof of these [...]
There is some wisdom in that old adage “never meet your idols.” The logic being, of course, that an actual person – with limitations, flaws, warts, BO, bum hair and streak marks just like the rest of us – can never live up to the unrealistic expectations we sometimes bestow upon our heroes. If you [...]
The belligerent breed of high tech alien human hunters originally created for director John McTiernan’s cult 1987 commando SCI-FI flick Predator are known simply as that – Predators. It’s a mantle that rightfully insinuates somewhat callous attitude towards human life, less than exemplary table manners and a flagrant disregard for at least (at least) one [...]
The Journalism on Screen Film Festival runs from 11 July to 18 July at Melbourne’s Village Jam Factory cinemas. It will showcase an impressive selection of old and recent films that depict journalists and the industry Hunter S. Thompson memorably described as “a low trade and a habit worse than heroin, a strange seedy world [...]
Let’s get the most important stuff out of the way first, shall we, because time is money, life is short, the clock is ticking, nobody lives forever and proponents of journalism’s inverted pyramid structure make it pretty damn clear you should put the most pertinent stuff at the top and the bits below become less [...]
The whiz kids at Pixar Studios continue a stellar strike record (13 good titles, no bad) with Toy Story 3, the third and final instalment in a trilogy of films that take the concept of personification to delightfully literal extremes, capturing the life, personalities and even politics of toys that come alive when humans aren’t [...]
see it
skip it
don't rush
