The phenomenal success of the Twilight and Harry Potter books prove great fortunate can be found in the arena of high school and adolescent coming of age stories, provided tales of classroom dramas, puberty blues and extra curriculum shenanigans can be mingled with more risqué supplements. Harry Potter brought magic, wizards and witches to the [...]
Just when it looked certain that the eerie success encountered by The Blair Witch Project was a once-off – after all, it’s been ten years since that faux DIY freaking-out-in-the-woods spook fest became an international box office behemoth – another American film financed on a similarly miniscule budget has been greeted with similarly phenomenal success.
Paranormal [...]
Writer/director Rian Johnson’ s 2005 debut feature, Brick, was a bold exercise in genre-merging that combined familiar concepts – the noir thriller and the high school coming of age drama – in unfamiliar ways. It was enigmatic, compelling and heavily stylised, layered with little clues, ciphers, fake outs and pockets of intrigue. His follow up [...]
“I always wanted to do a biblical flood movie, but I never felt I had the hook. I first read about the Earth’s Crust Displacement Theory in Graham Hancock’s “Fingerprints of the Gods”. When I discussed it with (co-writer) Harald (Kloser), I said we need a “plausible” reason, not a scientific one. Show this film [...]
Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol is arguably the world’s most famous festive season morality fable, a story of spiritual redemption and rediscovered merriment for misanthrope miser Ebenezer “bah humbug!” Scrooge. Jim Carrey, aided by a thick sheen of CGI profiling, plays the über frugal pernicious protagonist with a splendidly uptight aura. It is his second [...]
In The Time Traveler’s Wife Eric Bana plays Henry DeTamble, an unlikeable mope with an uncontrollable tendency to spontaneously melt into nothing and reappear, naked, in another timeframe. As you do.
Rachel McAdams plays his eponymous wife Clare, the ultra tolerant lovesick type who clearly sees in him something nobody else can. Well into this saccharine [...]
This Is It was the name of Michael Jackson’s highly anticipated concert tour that was scrapped less than three weeks before opening night, when death interrupted the pasty-faced star’s plans for a comeback. Director Kenny Ortega’s documentary of the same name plays a lot like a concert movie, but given there was never any actual [...]
If you’re looking for even handed and maturely nuanced debate, if you’re looking for objectivity, multifaceted perspectives and intelligent arguments unencumbered by sentiments and emotions, then stay the hell away from the films of veteran rabble-rouser Michael Moore, whose penchant for fire and brimstone documentary journalism burns ever-undulled in Capitalism: A Love Story. But if [...]
Many of the issues surrounding the ever-beleaguered state of the Australian film industry are encapsulated in Into the Shadows, a dense, compelling and cheaply produced documentary from debut writer/ director Anthony Scarano. Essentially a compilation of talking heads, Scarano collaborates an impressive cross-section of viewpoints from exhibitors, distributors, actors, writers, directors and other industry folk [...]
Watch the trailer for The Box and you’ll swear it’s gonna play like a by-the-numbers thriller dressed up with a careful-what-you-wish-for premise reminiscent of W.W. Jacobs’ classic short story The Monkey’s Paw. But brace yourself for something entirely different: an experience simultaneously compelling, befuddling, audacious and frustratingly disjointed.
The director is Richard Kelly, whose brilliantly conceived [...]
All too well conditioned by cinema’s dispiriting habit of transforming old school animated TV shows into retch-a-rific buckets of movie lard enjoyed only by the thoroughly forgiving, the morbidly curious and the criminally tasteless, I must admit to not having very high hopes – along with everybody else in the sane world – for Astro [...]
The term ‘3D horror movie’ may not engender great faith among art lovers or film aficionados but for a select breed of laughers and screamers it sure sounds like a helluva way to spend a night out – an invitation to don those new and improved 3D shades and hoot and squeal through a couple [...]
Any film explicitly about or involving food or cooking inevitably challenges critics to sharpen their analytical knives in the hope of carving up a culinary themed zinger or two: one might say, for example, that No Reservations was “a light snack not a three course meal”; What’s Cooking “a flavourless fable as hard to swallow [...]
Like most a-star-is-born biopics Bruce Beresford’s Mao’s Last Dancer affectionately charters the protagonist’s journey from an undiscovered hopeful to a celebrated artist – in this case from Chinese ballet prodigy Li Cunxin’s upbringing in rural China to his acclaimed dance career in America. And like most films about dancers it accentuates – consciously or not [...]
Ask any marijuana advocate about the transcendental qualities of smokin’ da herb and they’ll probably tell you it can overcome just about anything – culture, language, ideology, social/economic divide etcetera etcetera.
Stoner flicks of the western world tend to reflect ganga’s global ubiquitousness in the casting of ethnically diverse characters: think Harold and Kumar, think Dave [...]
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The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
In Search of Beethoven
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Phil Grabsky - director of In Search of Beethoven
Jonathan auf der Heide - director of Van Diemen's Land
Ana Kokkinos - director of Blessed
Jeremy Saunders - key art designer
Robert Connolly - writer/director of Balibo
Les Chantery - star of Cedar Boys
Bert Deling - director of Pure Shit
Warwick Thornton - writer/director of Samson & Delilah
Sergei Dvortsevoy - writer/director of Tulpan
Adam Elliot - writer/director of Mary and Max
Mark Forstmann - writer/director of Monkey Puzzle
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