Following a whirlwind romance in Monte Carlo, a naïve unnamed young woman (Lily James) is swept off her feet by the handsome and debonair and recently widowed Maxim De Winter (Armie Hammer) and marries him. She is whisked off to Manderley, his imposing ancestral mansion on the windswept English coast. But far from an idyllic…
The Babysitter: Killer Queen is a hybrid of gory horror, coming-of-age tale and black comedy. It’s the sequel to 2017’s cult favourite The Babysitter. In that film, teen Cole (Judah Lewis) discovered his babysitter was involved in a satanic blood cult. Two years after the events of that film the angst-ridden Cole is still traumatised,…
The Devil All the Time is a sprawling and multi-layered Southern Gothic tale of good and evil. The film offers a rich tapestry of amoral and unsavoury characters and explores that potent nexus between religion, sex and violence, fate and faith. The atypical and nonlinear narrative spans a couple of decades between the end of…
An ambitious but unusual take on the superhero/high concept sci-fi genre, Project Power has quickly become one of the most watched movies on the streaming giant Netflix platform. This slick action film seems to be setting itself up for a potential franchise. On the streets of New Orleans an experimental new drug known as Power…
Paul Murphy’s NZ feature Lowdown Dirty Criminals is an enjoyable but somewhat derivative crime-comedy. The darkly comic caper cribs from the Guy Ritchie playbook, with a lot of his flashy visual flourishes. The non-linear narrative structure uses plenty of flashbacks and replays scenes from different perspectives. The film opens with a Mexican standoff in a…
“Dead bodies usually mean something bad…” It’s 1945, towards the send of WWII. The German navy are even sinking hospital ships. When the film opens, a group of survivors from a sunken hospital ship are adrift somewhere in the North Atlantic. Tensions are high as they are desperately short of food and water. This motley…
A disturbing and unsettling drama about madness, toxic masculinity and unhealthy obsession, Deerskin (aka Le Daim) is the latest film from French electronic musician turned filmmaker Quentin Dupieux. His absurdist films have always done well on the festival circuit, and this oddball drama again explores some of his usual themes. Georges (played by Oscar winner…
We get to see very few Scandinavian films outside of film festivals in this country. The Icelandic film industry produces around 5 or 6 films a year, and several directors have gained an international reputation. Recently many major Hollywood productions, including Star Wars: Rogue One and Prometheus, have taken advantage of the country’s strikingly remote…
More twisted weirdness from New Zealand filmmaker Ant Timpson, best known for his work as a producer on gory horror films like the 2012 horror anthology The ABCs of Death. Timpson makes his feature directorial debut with this irreverent, nasty and darkly comic thriller about a young man who tries to reconnect with his estranged…
Set in Geelong, Undertow is a psychological drama about grief, loss and toxic masculinity particularly within the AFL. It also serves up a raw portrait of a woman suffering a breakdown following an emotionally traumatic event. The title references the turbulent emotions at play in this domestic drama. Claire (Laura Gordon) is a photojournalist who…
