October, 2011

Last Friday evening I attended a special event at Melbourne’s iconic Westgarth Cinemas hosted by Cult Vault. Every Friday Cult Vault plays late night screenings (11:30pm) of hard to find cult films. They usually screen one a week but last Friday I sat down to consecutively watch eight — yes, eight — for the inaugural [...]

1997 and 1998 were very good years for Andrew Niccol. In less than 24 months two spectacularly innovative features arrived in American cinemas. He wrote both and directed one, in the first steps of his career notching on his CV what most never achieve in a lifetime: two veritable masterpieces. Niccol’s screenplay for the Peter [...]

Director Nicolas Winding Refn’s stunning neo-noir film Drive arrives in Australian cinemas today. I wrote about it earlier this year as part of my coverage of the Melbourne International Film Festival. If you missed it, here’s my review: Drive, the story of a Hollywood stunt driver who moonlighters as a getaway man, is a white [...]

Reliably unpredictable director Steven Soderbergh (Erin Brockovich, Oceans Eleven, Traffic, The Limey) tries his hand at a rarely attempted genre: the disease disaster pic. Soderbergh directs Contagion with the stern unspeculative approach of a politician sticking to the line on a tricky issue: no bombast, no spectacle, no flamboyant movements. Instead, carefully guarded responses to [...]

Director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr revisits the frosty arctic-extraterrestrial territory John Carpenter memorably splattered with blood, gore and a good dollop of psychological intensity in his 1982 classic The Thing. Both films are adaptations of John W. Campbell Jr’s short story ‘Who Goes There?’, with van Heijningen Jr’s cheekily billed as a prequel to Carpenter’s. [...]

The Hunter, an outback Australian adventure/drama starring Willem Dafoe, Sam Neil and Frances O’Connor, taps into the legend of the Tasmanian tiger and uses it to frame a story about a stoic hunter’s psychological journey. Set largely in lush Tasmanian wilderness and loosely adapted from a novel by Julia Leigh, Dafoe plays Martin David, a [...]

Academy Award winner Susan Sarandon arrived on the scene late last month, offering sage advice to the Occupy Wall Street protestors. “Come together to decide on one issue to focus on and stick with it so you look like you know what you’re talking about,” she said. Alec Baldwin stopped by a few weeks later, [...]

More than 10 weeks into its theatrical release, director Kriv Stenders’s all ages ode to the power and personality of a pedigree pooch, Red Dog, is still taking chunky bites out of the box office. Last weekend the film (which opened August 4) earned $322,892, pushing it over the $20 million milestone. This makes Red [...]

Reviews have began trickling in for The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, the first in a trilogy of Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson’s big screen adaptations of Hergé’s treasured graphic novels. A combination of animation and performance capture technology, the film was directed by Spielberg, with Jackson expected to take on the [...]

Writer/director Jonathan Teplitzky (Gettin’ Square, Better Than Sex) offsets the grimness of making a film about overcoming grief by modelling what could have been a morbidly despairing downer into a pot of revved-up and risqué drama with a soulful core simmering beneath the bombast. Sex, swearing, car crashes, flames and fast-paced kitchen scenes that make [...]

Having last night attended a back-to-back screening of classic 1930s “educational” exploitation films Reefer Madness (1936) and Sex Madness (1938), it’s tempting, as it always is when indulging in these nom nom nuggets of nostalgic nonsense, to lunge into a patronising appraisal of the awesome tomfoolery exhibited by all and sundry. It’s a temptation I [...]

Today two scorching new films I’ve previously written about open in Australian cinemas. Kevin Smith’s Red State, which I watched and reviewed a few weeks ago, is a supremely sacrilegious scary movie fitted with unsubtle political and religious undertones. It’s quite a piece of work. You can read my detailed review of the film, including [...]

Producers of the Australian film Surviving Georgia have responded to a Crikey story published last week by making 11th-hour changes to its marketing materials in the lead-up to its theatrical release in select cinemas tomorrow. Prompted by a story broken by blogger Glenn Dunks, Crikey reported that the pseudo tear-jerker drama splashed a glowing four-star “review” [...]

There are two good reasons why director Craig Brewer’s knee strummin’ small town dance drama Footloose, starring Dennis Quaid, Andie MacDowell and a cast of relative limb flingin’ unknowns, feels remodelled and outdated, like an old vase given a fresh lick of paint or a sun-bleached picture hung with a shiny new frame. The first [...]

There was Astro Turf passed off as “green carpet”, a pair of race horses milling on the side of the road, photographers, journos and TV presenters hovering like flies, men with greasy hair in pinstripe suits and streams of what one punter described with a spit of vitriol as “a butcher shop of mutton dressed [...]

Every year it arrives. It generates incandescent rage from a clique of Seen It Before critics, a fog of apathy from general punters and a collective, sad sigh from most who cross its path or hear vague stories about its awfulness. It is the film that epitomises in one fell swoop why much of the [...]