August, 2012

When quizzed at Cannes about the public’s response to his new film Holy Motors, an art-on-roids indie that lingers garishly in the memory like the dance moves of a high-powered beast, a kind of cinematic Big Foot seen once, never forgotten, and not necessarily for the right reasons, French director Leos Carax quipped: “I don’t know [...]

Not many film reviews can credibly begin with words like “Vin Diesel should have been cast instead of” or even “Arnold Schwarzenegger’s performance was vastly superior than” but take a bow, Colin Farrell and the Total Recall reboot team, for encouraging the commentariat to pen a weird new chapter of critical analysis, in which lines like [...]

Charlie Casanova is not a film you watch and forget. Irish writer/director Terry McMahon’s grungy hard-hitting character portrait follows a self-obsessed sociopath named Charlie (Emmett J. Scanlan) who runs over a woman with his car and decides, Two Face style, to draw a card to determine whether he calls the police. His business is struggling, [...]

Reality TV is a cesspool of broken dreams and bad decisions. Advertising is a grifters game for snake oil merchants and soul-sucking suits. The 24 hour media cycle dumps regurgitated offal into a vast intellectual wasteland. Already spurious notions of celebrity and stardom continue to swing further into the realms of the wretched as we [...]

Hollywood has been hit with a grim bolt from the blue, with news today that veteran action director Tony Scott, brother of Ridley, has reportedly committed suicide. He was 68. Scott’s last picture was 2011′s disastertainment pulse-pounder Unstoppable, a horror-on-rails epic in which the villain was a freight train that wouldn’t slow down. He was [...]

Click here to listen to the latest episode of The Parallax Podcast This episode of The Parallax Podcast launches a new semi-regular series featuring special guests — notable Australians discussing a film-related theme of their choice. Myself and co-host Rich Haridy are joined by veteran comedian and broadcaster Lawrence Mooney, who elected to discuss the subject of positive male role models in cinema. With [...]

Co-directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris follow-up their beautifully balanced 2006 crowd pleaser Little Miss Sunshine with a playful Woody Allen-esque rom-com, tightly framed around a neurotic upper class writer who struggles, in equal measure, to deal with girlfriend and his imagination. The Kaufman-like twist in Ruby Sparks is that they are in a sense [...]

Did you know director Chris Columbus’ seemingly inane 1990 hit Home Alone is actually a sophisticated pre-9/11 send-up of American infatuation with national security? Ever stop to consider that the famous sewerage pipe escape scene in The Shawshank Redemption (1994) is both a visual and visceral commentary on the underlining rottenness of institutionalised “justice” and the [...]

Lloyd Bradford Syke is a Sydney-based theatre critic whose prolific and voluminous reviews can be found on Crikey’s theatre blog Curtain Call. As a long-time fan of Syke’s work, it is a pleasure to have him contribute this piece to Cinetology, an on-the-scene account of Undergound Cinema‘s first Sydney screening. For those unfamiliar with the concept, Underground [...]

When you remember it, and it certainly lingers large in the memory, the stretchy shit-eating smile of local actor/comedian Angus Sampson (pictured above, left) seems unrealistically large, as if it extends further than the borders of his face and leaves the rest of his body lingering limply below like the legs of a ventriloquist’s puppet. Despite a [...]

There is something perversely amusing about watching a pulpy B-grade movie doggedly pursue extreme historical revisionism. That’s not just because Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is based on ‘real-life’ events that, in the unlikely case you require clarification, didn’t actually transpire. It also applies a revisionist technique to storytelling, using the largely modern conceit of conjoining two [...]

Click here to listen to the latest episode of The Parallax Podcast Has Twilight heartthrob Robert Pattinson gone from himbo to highbrow? In this episode of The Parallax Podcast, myself and Rich Haridy discuss Pattinson’s latest film, Cosmopolis. We also chat about Steven Soderbergh’s male stripper movie Magic Mike (now playing in cinemas) and stylistic action flick Haywire (now on DVD), plus Bruce Robinson’s The Rum [...]

Veteran director David Cronenberg, who for decades has occupied a distinguished residence as one of the most interesting and inventive living American filmmakers, seemed to be sailing into safer passages. A trio of classy dramas, hard-hitting at times but nothing you couldn’t take your mum to (A History of Violence [2005], Eastern Promises [2007] and this [...]