2011

There is something supremely unsettling about Glenn Close’s performance in Albert Nobbs, and not just because she plays a woman pretending to be a man in director Rodrigo Garcia’s Dublin-set 1930s period piece, or that she required virtually no makeup to physically pull it off. It’s difficult to pinpoint what makes Close’s strangle feat of [...]

Is it a good or bad thing when an animal out acts a human cast? Joey, aka War Horse, is the eponymous photogenic thoroughbred at the heart of Steven Spielberg’s latest glossily produced middle of the road fare – essentially a collection of seven or eight handsomely shot World War I short films stuck together [...]

After directing a hardboiled gangster pic (The Departed), a grisly hallucinogenic thriller (Shutter Island), an episode of prohibition-set drama Boardwalk Empire and two music documentaries, Martin Scorsese splashes colour instead of blood or guitar riffs across the screen in Hugo, an eye moistening family crowd pleaser that marks the first time the veteran 70-year-old director [...]

It was a year in which the film industry – particularly Hollywood – told us left was right, up was down and any preconceived notions you have about the cinema ought to be left at the candy bar. 2011 was as unpredictable as they come, a mixed bag of surprises, pleasures and stinkers. Here we [...]

Let the kudos continue! It’s time to acknowledge cinema’s top five female performances (plus five honorable mentions) of 2011. Honourable mentions Melissa McCarthy (Bridesmaids), Melissa Leo (Red State), Hailee Steinfeld (True Grit), Mélanie Laurent (Beginners), Tilda Swinton (We Need to Talk About Kevin). Kirsten Dunst (Melancholia) To say Kirsten Dunst’s sad-eyed performance as a bride suffering [...]

Let the Cinetology awards ceremony begin! There were plenty of tremendous male performances throughout the year — more than enough to make the task of whittling a list down to five stand-outs (plus five honorable mentions) very difficult indeed. If you feel somebody has been cheated of a gong, be sure to leave a comment [...]

Gems ‘n’ Junk From the Cult Cache combs the vast wastelands of cinema history to unearth flicks buried beneath the surface of popular entertainment. In this instalment: the Kim Jong-il produced North Korean monster movie Pulgasari.  North Korea’s Dear Leader, the late Kim Jong-il, was talented at a great many things, among them building nuclear weapons, rockin’ [...]

Over the last decade or so I’ve interviewed countless writers, actors and directors, many of them terrifically talented artists whose work I greatly admire. But prior to meeting and interviewing Joe “the Juicer” Cross — who is, in the spectrum of film practitioners, much closer to an average Joe (pardon the pun) than a Scorsese — [...]

After director J.J. Abrams and star Philip Seymour Hoffman gave the Mission Impossible series a shot in the arm in Mission: Impossible 3 (2006), two-time Oscar winning filmmaker Brad Bird arrives to turn that shot into a blood transfusion in the spectacular Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, which, despite its espionage gadgets and crazy techno-thingmebobs, [...]

A glossily shot and dramatically embellished biopic starring an acclaimed actor playing one of the previous century’s most powerful political figures, timed to be released in the thick of awards season scuttlebutt… This is what industry commentators warily dub “Oscar bait” — productions that appear to be engineered with one fundamental motivation in mind: to [...]

Debut director Mike Cahill’s brooding indie Another Earth imagines not just another planet capable of housing human life but another planet on which humans irrefutably live. It doesn’t stop there: on this planet, which has recently appeared in the sky, another version of every person on Earth exists. Another you, another me. A population of [...]

Monster Pictures, the Australian distributor of gross-out horror film The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence) — which was banned last week by the Classification Review Board (CRB) after initially being given an R rating in May — will submit an edited version of the film for reclassification this Friday. Cinetology can confirm that a hearing [...]

This week Screen Australia announced a pre-Christmas goodies bag of funding investments, with $17 million slated for a range of film and TV projects. The overarching theme is feature investments with a strong whiff of the macabre. Fans of director Mark Hartley’s high octane cult film documentaries Not Quite Hollywood and Machete Maidens will likely [...]

It’s rarely a good idea for a reviewer to read analysis of a film before formulating their own, but one criticism of Steven Spielberg’s long-awaited adaptation of Hergé’s beloved Tintin graphic novels — the first in a trilogy co-produced by Peter Jackson — bounded across the film world so loudly it could hardly be ignored. [...]

Yesterday I wrote a piece for the Crikey bulletin discussing the banning of A Serbian Film and The Human Centipede II, and what bans mean in a media landscape that has irrevocably changed since the days of Pure Shit or even Baise-moi. To read it, click the picture below:  

Debut director Joe Cross’s inspiring documentary about healthy living, Fat Sick and Nearly Dead, is screening for free on YouTube this weekend for Australian and New Zealand audiences until midnight Saturday. Detailing Cross’s mission to travel 3000 miles across America consuming nothing but juice, slimming down from 140 kilos, the film is a rare find: [...]