The shape-shifting scenery-chewing Sacha Baron Cohen is back, flaunting the world stage, defecating on standards of public decency and injecting his trademark brand of in-ya-face parody in The Dictator, which marks his fourth collaboration with ex-Seinfeld brains trust Larry Charles. Charles’ first film, Masked and Anonymous, was released in 2003 but has already been lost [...]
In the dimly lit ornately adorned gusty hallways of gothic-esque “out there” cinema, once crazy-cool auteur Tim Burton (Beetlejuice, Batman, Mars Attacks! etc) has not so much jumped the shark as splattered it in ghoulish make-up and rocket launched himself into a thick cloud of unintentional parody from whence he may never emerge. The veteran [...]
Infidelity, drugs, violence, car crashes, betrayal, sordid secrets and dingy bars where unspeakable acts take place behind beaded curtains. No, not the One Direction crew a decade from now (boom tish) but the tumultuous soul-sucking events that enflame the lives of a group of Aussies on holiday in Cambodia in writer/director Kieran Darcy-Smith’s Wish You [...]
The latest gung-ho Hollywood war movie to disembark on Australian shores is predictably chocked to the gills with guns, explosions, beefcake soldiers and petrified looking foreigners. But Act of Valour, from directors Mike McCoy and Scott Waugh, new kids on the explosives-laden blockbuster block, is distinguishable from the rest of the “fire in the hole” [...]
It’s a marriage made in geeked-out fanboy heaven: Buffy brain trust Joss Whedon arranges the biggest ensemble of iconic superheroes since his target audience played with figurines in their sand pits. The Iron Man, Captain America, Hulk and Thor franchises collide in a big budget behemoth designed to bring out the gawking child in all [...]
And so it arrives, spurred on by the brain dead bombast of director Peter Berg’s Battleship: a grim vision of the future of entertainment more disturbing than Justin Bieber augmented reality sunglasses. It’s all about brands. Hollywood’s remake/sequel/prequel/adaptation infatuation won’t stop at video games, board games, books, comics, TV shows or figurines. When tinsel town’s well [...]
April 12, 2012 – 10:06 am
Three months after major up and coming talent Tanja Liedtke was appointed artistic director of the Sydney Dance Comedy – a holy grail of arts gigs – fate dealt a cruel hand and she died after being hit by a garbage truck in August 2007. Life in Movement, directed by debut documentarians Sophie Hyde and [...]
After scorching the Australian film industry with her blistering low budget street drama The Jammed (2007), a damning exposé on illegal prostitution rings in Melbourne, writer/director Dee McLachlan returns to throw some kero on the fire with a hell-for-leather send-up of reality television so fast moving it needs a sign: no pregnant women or people with [...]
Blockbuster book to film adaptations have moved on from magic-n-monsters to the arena of macabre survival games — at least until the next bestselling Johnny-come-lately hits the shelves. Futuristic reality TV spoof The Hunger Games, directed by Gary Ross, is based on the first of three books from author Suzanne Collins. It’s the latest box [...]
Set over 24 hours and based in the headquarters of the first Wall Street investment firm to predict that the first waves of the GFC were about to hit, and hit hard, writer/director J.C. Chandor serves up a disaster movie with bad ledgers instead of trampled cities and sweaty people in suits instead of angry [...]
Two people. A single room. One enormous cat and mouse conversation. Writer/director John Winter’s strange and seductive vaudevillian one setting power play between a sex worker and a male interviewee is black and white only in a literal sense — soaked in a smoky monochrome and lit and edited to charcoal-infused perfection. The grasp and [...]
March 19, 2012 – 10:38 pm
Writer/director Gareth Evans’ full throttle guns-n-fisticuffs Indonesian action flick is a hardcore bloke fest — the kind in which performances are measured by who can best impersonate someone who just murdered their parents with a pickaxe, chased it by drinking a pint of nails then sat down to watch three hours of lawnmower informercials. In The [...]
Belgian writer/director/producers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne capture with heartfelt verisimilitude a boy’s misplaced determination to find a father figure in The Kid With a Bike, a sad and sobering coming of age story told in the European style: no guarantees, no sugar coating, no fidelity to a three act structure. The central performance from lil [...]
The opening shot of director Bruce Robinson’s The Rum Diary — his first film in almost two decades — depicts a small plane flying into a beautiful coastal city hugged by deep blue water and cooked in sunshine. It’s a slick brochure-ready picture of San Juan, but it’s not long before we see the chaotic [...]
Disney’s US$250 million intergalactic swords and sandals spectacle, replete with all the trimmings of blockbustepic excess, arrives hungry to mess with seen-it-before audiences who think they have the genre of spacey SCI-FI fantasies down pat. John Carter face plants into a stuffed trough of genres and sub-genres, new and old, and emerges covered in a [...]
see it
skip it
don't rush
