The 2019 German Film Festival is currently getting underway around the country. The festival aims to showcase the best new German cinema across all genres with a curated selection of 31 films. It all kicks off with Balloon (Ballon) by Michael ‘Bully’ Herbig. This film is a stranger-than-fiction story about two families trying to escape…
It’s rare that we get to see a film from Paraguay. It’s even rarer that this deeply conservative country would produce a film about two elderly lesbians whose relationship is undergoing something of a crisis. But that’s what we get in The Heiresses from writer/director Marcelo Martinessi. Chela (played by veteran theatre actress Anna Brun…
Inspirational. Damon Gameau makes compelling and engaging documentaries (That Sugar Film really struck a chord). Importantly, he delivers his messages in a decidedly different manner. He puts himself at the centre of the docos and makes them relatable. Apart from consulting experts, they feature his family. In the case of 2040, particularly his four-year-old daughter,…
Fun, feisty and politically incorrect, Me and My Left Brain is a throwback to a different era. The film is a charming, if sometimes heavy-handed, boy-meets-girl story. Arthur (Alex Lykos) is in love with Helen (Chantelle Barry). He seeks advice from his best friend Vivien (Rachael Beck) but is constantly hounded by a voice in…
Life is tough for a pair of adult sisters in Little Woods. Ollie (Tessa Thompson) and her estranged sibling Deb (Lily James) live in the economically depressed fracking town of Little Woods, North Dakota. Deb has a young son with a deadbeat dad (James Badge Dale). Mother and son live illegally in a caravan that…
You can’t say you don’t know what you’ll get with a John Wick movie, because that was very much established in the last two installments. The story starts with bloodied and retired super assassin John Wick (Keanu Reeves) just minutes away from having a $14 million bounty put on his head. He has killed a…
In 1613 William Shakespeare (played in All is True by Kenneth Branagh) was the most famous writer in England. But then his beloved Globe Theatre burned to the ground during a performance of his final play Henry VIII after a prop misfired. Shakespeare retired following that disaster and returned home to Stratford-upon-Avon. There he pottered…
Poms is a comedy in which senior citizens act like teenagers. Martha (Diane Keaton) has cancer. So she sells up her belongings in the city and retreats to a sprawling retirement community where residents are promised the time of their lives for the rest of their lives. But Martha isn’t your typical resident – she…
Recently we’ve had a number of female-centric remakes of films with the likes of Ghostbusters, Ocean’s 8 and the atrocious What Men Want hitting cinemas, all of which were vastly inferior to the original. Now we get this female centric remake of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, the hilarious 1988 comedy that teamed Michael Caine and Steve…
In the tradition of Forrest Gump, The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir is a wild ride, which combines coincidence with circumstance. It’s a quirky cross-cultural fantasy about a good-natured thief who makes good. Aja (Dhanush) is a poor young fakir (or magician) from the streets of India, being brought up by his single mother, whom…
