It’s not every day you get to watch a movie about Nazis from the dark side of the moon who come down to invade Earth, and certainly not every day you get to speak to the filmmaker who made it happen. Iron Sky (currently playing in Australian cinemas) aka the ‘Nazis from the moon movie’ [...]
For decades director David Cronenberg has created perversely interesting representations of the human body. In Videodrome (1983) James Woods hides a gun by pushing it into his stomach. Jeff Goldblum transforms into a man/insect hybrid in The Fly (1986). The characters in Crash (1996) get off on having intercourse immediately after automobile accidents. In Existenz (1999), Jude Law uses a pistol [...]
Shortly after the release of the acclaimed Oscar-winning Days of Heaven in 1978 its director, Terence Malick, whose previous film Badlands was equally respected by critics, moved to Paris and disappeared from public view. He returned to the chair 20 years later to make the star-studded The Thin Red Line. It is always a curious occurrence when [...]
January 5, 2012 – 2:21 pm
The Women on the 6th Floor, veteran French writer/director Philippe Le Guay’s crowd-pleasing dramedy about a bourgeois man who breaks free of his upper-class constraints to join — locationally and emotionally — the maids living above him was a box office smash hit last year in France and Palace Films’ marquee summer release in Australia. Set [...]
December 20, 2011 – 10:01 am
Over the last decade or so I’ve interviewed countless writers, actors and directors, many of them terrifically talented artists whose work I greatly admire. But prior to meeting and interviewing Joe “the Juicer” Cross — who is, in the spectrum of film practitioners, much closer to an average Joe (pardon the pun) than a Scorsese — [...]
November 22, 2011 – 9:12 am
Few films that deal with the pain and suffering from the loss of a loved one are as bold and innovative as Burning Man, a scorching new Australian drama from writer/director/producer Jonathan Teplitzky. His third and by far best feature film (Teplitzky also directed Better Than Sex and Gettin’ Square), Burning Man follows the whirlwind [...]
October 23, 2011 – 5:17 pm
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 [...]
October 4, 2011 – 3:54 pm
They’re film nerds, and they’re damn proud of it. At least that’s the impression one gets while watching ABC2′s new show The Bazura Project, the brainchild of Aussie cinephiles Lee Zachariah and Shannon Marinko. Well, more or less new. To clarify: The Bazura Project (which airs every Thursday night at 9pm on ABC2 for the [...]
September 2, 2011 – 8:14 am
Face to Face is a powerful and compelling Australian drama based almost entirely in a single setting: a mediation room in which a group of irate colleagues air their grievances. Adapted by Queen of the Damned director Michael Rymer from a David Williamson play, the film is an expertly told gab-fest that cleverly realigns the [...]
Oranges and Sunshine, the debut feature film of director Jim Loach, shines a light on an ugly period in British and Australian history in the 50s and 60s when around 7000 British children were deported to Australia. The kids were promised a land of oranges and sunshine but instead found themselves imprisoned in an institution [...]
Part documentary, part invasion movie, part comedy and part creature feature, director Mark Lewis’s Cane Toads: The Conquest is a roaring nonfiction feature about the devastating effects the introduction of cane toads have had on Australia. An uproariously entertaining hybrid feature, available to watch to 3D in some venues across Australia, it is a sequel [...]
Snowtown is the uncompromising debut feature of director Justin Kurzel, who depicts the lives of the infamous ‘bodies in the barrels’ killers leading up to their incarceration in the late 90′s. It was always going to be a tricky project to approach, given the film raises obvious ethical questions about how to represent the murderers [...]
Just when it seemed like Schembrigate was done and dusted, Crikey senior journalist Andrew Crook uncovered new evidence contradicting Jim Schembri’s explanation that he intentionally spoiled Scream 4 in order to “punk” the Twitterverse. Schembri’s explanation was — to put it generously — a shade difficult to accept, but Crook’s forensic analysis of what happened [...]
February 7, 2011 – 12:37 pm
Stephen Frears is not known as an interviewee who is particularly kind or accommodating to film journalists. The two time Oscar nominated director of films such as The Queen, High Fidelity, Dangerous Liaisons, Dirty Pretty Things, The Grifters, Mary Reilly and now Tamara Drewe is in fact known for precisely the opposite: blunt, impatient and [...]
November 25, 2010 – 2:56 pm
If you thought Animal Kingdom would be the only hit-you-for-six Australian genre film released in 2010, think again. A new horse has arrived in writer/director Patrick Hughes’ spectacular neo-western Red Hill (opening this week in cinemas) about a group of small town cops who get tracked down and returned to their maker when an Aboriginal [...]
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