In 1986 comedian Rodney Dangerfield went Back to School for one of his better comedies. Thirty years later, comic Melissa McCarthy goes back to school for the flat and largely lifeless Life of the Party . This is the third collaboration between McCarthy and her writer/director husband Ben Falcone. It follows the awful Tammy; and…
On the night of 18 July 1969, a car driven by the last remaining scion of the famous Kennedy family careened off a bridge on Chappaquiddick, a small island just off Martha’s Vineyard. The political cost to Senator Ted Kennedy was great, but nothing like the devastation suffered by the family of Mary Jo Kopechne,…
Anyone who has ever had a newborn in the house will immediately relate to Jason Reitman’s Tully. This funny, affecting film delivers a compelling tale of motherhood in the 21st Century. Of course, it also marks the reunion of Reitman with Diablo Cody. It’s now 11 years since their breakout hit Juno, and their only…
At the risk of offending true believers, this is a church movie. It pivots around forgiveness. To the best of my knowledge, it was largely, if not entirely, funded from church resources. I dare say its key audience will be those of the faith, and ex-pat New Zealanders (it was made there, and is set…
Imagine if we lived in but one version of the world and there were other incarnations. What would be the benefits and the dangers? That mind-bending contention is at the heart of the low budget Australian sci-fi drama, The Gateway. Physicist and researcher Jane Chandler (Jacqueline McKenzie) is happily married to writer, Matt (Myles Pollard)….
Breath is a haunting and elegiac coming-of-age tale. Set on the wind-swept coast of Western Australia in the 70s, it centres on two 14-year old surf rats. Bruce Pike – aka Pikelet – (Samuel Coulter) and Ivan Loon – aka Loonie – (Ben Spence) are best friends. Pike is a good boy from a respectable…
Planet Earth II Live in Concert offers windows to the world like you’ve never seen before. It’s all on a giant screen, with spectacular musical accompaniment. The vision is drawn from the Emmy and BAFTA award-winning Sir David Attenborough series that was aired in Australia last year and took four years to make. The music…
The unique talent that was Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunipingu is showcased in this reverential documentary written and directed by Paul Williams. Gurrumul is known as a band member of Yothu Yindi; and a supreme artist in his own right. He spoke little, but said so much through his evocative music. More often than not he let…
then Loveless is a slow moving, atmospheric Russian drama that features harsh characters. It won of the Jury Prize at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for a Best Foreign Language Oscar. Zhenya (Maryana Spivak) and Boris (Aleksey Rozin) have a deep disdain for one another; and for their 12 year-old son, Alyosha…
The excitement I felt while watching One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) – a pivotal movie in my formative years – came flooding back while watching Unsane. A smart young woman seeks help after a stalker has made her life miserable for two years. But she’s inadvertently admitted to a private psychiatric hospital. The…
