June, 2012

Writer/director Maïwenn Le Besco goes further than CSI would ever dare tread, into the seedy world of juvenile protection police in the engaging albeit dramatically scattered action/drama Polisse. The film is to sex offenders units what In the loop is to politics: a terse and tense set of prickly situations, sped up and racy, with lots of [...]

Toilet humour top dogs Bobby and Peter Farrelly point their laser guns in the direction of Larry, Curly and Moe aka The Three Stooges, the popular knockabout slapstick outfit created in 1925, seven years after the end of World War I. The dunderhead trio return with lookalike actors and the trimmings of primitive screen comedy lovingly [...]

A Royal Affair is writer/director Nikolaj Arcel’s sumptuously shot love triangle drama set in 18th century Denmark. The story, full of political powerplays and back room machinations, focuses on a Danish queen, her insane king and a German doctor. Based on real events and partly adapted from a novel by Bodil Steensen-Leth, Queen Caroline Mathilde [...]

Click here to listen to the latest episode of The Parallax Podcast Director Rupert Sanders takes a bite out of the remake/reboot/re-adaptation apple with a fresh take on Snow White in Snow White and the Huntsman, starring Kristen Stewart and Charlize Theron. Bob Hoskins appears as one of the seven dwarves and looks…rather drugged out. Meanwhile, Michelle [...]

A debilitative cinematic disorder we can call ‘the quirk-riddled indie dramedy’ has gnawed at the edges of America’s alternative filmmaking movement for some time now, buoyed by the dreamy stylings of directors such as Miranda July (Me You and Everyone We Know, The Future), Wes Anderson (The Darjeerling Jimited, The Royal Tenenbaums) and Rian Johnson [...]

While I was watching Rock of Ages, director Adam Shankman’s film adaptation of the 80s-set off-Broadway production, something strange happened to my face. As the story of Sherrie (Julianne Hough), a small town gal living in a lone-lee world began to unfold and a star-studded cast sang anthems from the decade that taste forgot while [...]

A drug deal gone bad; a suitcase full of cash; a greedy cop; a coy beautiful woman and a stranger in an outback town. Swerve is writer/director Craig Lahiff’s densely plotted but tenuously connected Australian thriller starring David Lyons as Colin, a former Iraq war engineer who wished he never drove into the dusty shit hole of [...]

The long anticipated first trailer for Quentin Tarantino’s neo-western Django Unchained hit the net today, and it’s not bad at all: pulpy, bloody and dripping with style. The trailer deploys a technique that’s been getting a good run lately; let’s call it the ‘Johnny Cash on your trailer’ trick. What better way to pique interest [...]

In a surprise move announced this morning, Ridley Scott’s mega-budget sci-fi epic Prometheus has been downgraded from MA to M by the Australian Classification Review Board (ACRB). After being originally granted an MA rating, distributor 20th Century Fox submitted a request for the rating to be reassessed and a five member panel ruled in their [...]

If every mention of a new Mel Gibson movie must invariably proffer at least a passing mention of his widely glimpsed private life — and sadly this seems to be the case, so best to get it out the way early — at least Gibson can take some comfort in the knowledge that his creative [...]

By any definition Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) is a bona fide classic. It fascinated and terrified audiences in their droves, was a game-changer for the science fiction and horror genres and has sustained many years of critical kudos. But to say it was recognised as a “classic” at the time of its release, despite generally [...]