Basketball is huge in America; and Air Jordan shoes are now synonymous with it. Of course, that wasn’t always the case. Director and actor Ben Affleck’s (Argo) new film AIR tells the story of how the greatest basketball player of all time, the shoe and the Nike company came together. So this is one of…
Hirokazu Kore-eda is one of Japan’s greatest living filmmakers. You could mount a case he’s the greatest living Japanese filmmaker if you exclude animation (and thus, Hayao Miyazaki). In 2013, he took home the Special Jury Prize from the same event for Like Father, Like Son. In 2018, he won the Palme d’Or at Cannes…
Movies based on video games are pretty common – Angry Birds, Sonic the Hedgehog and Pokemon: Detective Pikachu to name a few. But movies based on board games seems counter-intuitive. I mean, the board doesn’t move, and much of the play is inside the players’ heads. So the arrival of Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among…
Has the art of movie titling been lost? Following on from the recent Women Talking comes another film that does exactly what it says on the box with Elizabeth Banks’ Cocaine Bear. Cocaine Bear is (very) loosely based on real events. Drug smugglers did indeed dump a load of cocaine over northern Georgia and southern…
The fifth cycle of Marvel Cinematic Universe films kicks off with Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. In the hands of director Peyton Reed (who directed the previous two Ant-Man films), this feels like something of a throwback. While nodding to the MCU’s current multiverse mania, Reed delivers an action film steeped in nostalgia. The only…
After 16 years, Todd Field makes a long-awaited return to the director’s chair with Tár. Having made two under-appreciated gems of the early 2000s with In the Bedroom (2001) and Little Children (2006), he hurtles back into the cultural conversation with this challenging but dazzling film. Tár is set in the rarefied world of Western…
Whatever else you might think about writer-director Damien Chazell’s first two films – Whiplash and La La Land – they definitely had a very clear narrative drive. And, even though it was grander in scope, you could say the same about his third film, First Man. But with Babylon, he replaces sharp linear narrative with…
Terry Pratchett was a prolific writer, and still commands a massive fan base. You could think of him as a kind of Roald Dahl or J. K. Rowling with a more surreal edge. His audiences tend to be more Monty Python than Harry Potter. But in the animated romp The Amazing Maurice, co-directors Toby Genkel…
In the conversation around the greatest living movie director, Steven Spielberg is very much in the mix. From his feature debut with Duel, through his trademark films like E.T. and the Indiana Jones series, to his serious works in Schindler’s List and Lincoln, few directors can match his filmography. Now he takes his audience back…
After two years of disruption, movie-going in Australia pretty much got back to normal in 2022. After a slow start, loosening of COVID-related restrictions saw audiences coming back to the big screen. Box office receipts were up according to BoxOfficeMojo, though the increase over the pretty miserable 2021 figures was perhaps smaller than studios and…
