The Beekeeper is a wild ride – ultra-violent, over-the-top nonsense. But – dare I admit it – also a guilty pleasure. Some of the dialogue is horrendous. The scene that gets the plot going is extremely wooden. Plausibility is never in question because it simply doesn’t exist. And yet the choreographed action, with one man…
Alexander Payne doesn’t make movies all that regularly – only five full features between 2000 and 2020. But when he does, everyone takes notice. And while his previous film, Downsizing (2017) might have been a little underwhelming, there’s nothing disappointing about The Holdovers. Payne’s best-known film is probably Sideways (2004), and here he teams with…
A backyard pool all but becomes a living entity in the horror film Night Swim. The malevolent force does its worst early on before we settle into the main storyline, which loops back to what happened at the start. The appearance of a toy boat seemingly operating by itself in the dead of night portends…
On 14th August 1936, the US eights rowing crew did something very special at the Berlin Olympics. The Boys in the Boat is their story. The eight, plus an alternate and a cox were drawn from working class men during the Depression era. The team was handpicked by well-meaning and decent University of Washington coach…
The power, the glory and the horrors associated with one of the world’s most prestigious marques is on show in Ferrari. The primary focus is on its controlling founder, Enzo Ferrari. Born in Modena, Italy in 1898, Enzo would go on to become a racing car driver, before retiring at the age of 33. He…
Once seemingly a license to make money, the sheen seems to have worn off the superhero movie genre following a few disappointing films like The Marvels, Blue Beetle and the troubled The Flash. And now here comes what is, arguably, the nadir of the genre with this waterlogged sequel to 2018’s Aquaman. Aquaman and the…
Celebrity – it’s the dream of many and the nightmare of some. Norwegian writer-director Kristoffer Borgli (in his English-language debut) takes a quirky but deep dive into the nature of celebrity in the current cultural moment with Dream Scenario. The result, while a little uneven, is nonetheless intriguing. Depicting dreams in cinema – or any…
After something of a misstep with the uneven Thor: Love and Thunder, director Taika Waititi returns to the kind of gentle humour that has marked his career with Next Goal Wins. If you like early Taika – Eagle vs Shark, or Flight of the Conchords, for example – you’ll likely warm to this rollicking underdog…
If 2022 saw a return to normality for the first time since 2019, in 2023 cinema took a beat to consolidate. And if 2022 was really all about Top Gun: Maverick, in 2023 the pie got divided up rather more evenly. Australian box office dominated by “Barbienheimer” with the international smash hit Barbie taking out…
Opposites attract, repel, and attract again in the French comedy Two Tickets to Greece. In 1989, brash teenager Magalie and conservative Blandine were besties at school. An argument over a boy saw an end to that and Magalie moved away. Now, three decades on and two years after her husband left her, radiology technician Blandine…
