What happens when water encounters fire? That’s the question behind Pixar’s latest animated adventure comedy, Elemental. A glowing couple, Bernie (the voice of Ronnie del Carmen) and Cinder (Shila Ommi), arrive in Element City and are duly processed. Circumstances have resulted in them leaving their beloved home, Fireland. Element City is a place where each…
These days you can’t make a superhero movie without reference to the multiverse – and so it is in the latest DC offering, The Flash. The nerdish, insecure Barry Allen (Ezra Miller), who works in criminal forensics, is the voraciously hungry pivotal figure. As The Flash, he is a founding member of The Justice League,…
A moving, slice-of-life piece, One Fine Morning combines the sensitive touch of writer-director Mia Hansen-Love (Bergman Island) with the acting chops of leading actor Lea Seydoux. Seydoux plays Sandra Kienzler, a single mother whose husband died five years ago. A translator, she and her family are dealing with the deteriorating health of her father Georg…
Director Eric Lavaine reunites most of the cast of his 2014 ensemble comedy Barbecue and brings them back to reprise their characters for this sequel, which was one of the hits of the recent French Film Festival. Happy 50 is also known as Plancha (“griddle”) in its original French. Eight years after the events of…
The feelgood film The Bank of Dave is based on the true story of Dave Fishwick; a businessman from Burnley, one of the most deprived towns in northern England. Dave became wealthy from running his own business selling vans to local customers, and he began loaning money to locals in need of support to help…
As Gordon Gekko, in the 1987 Oliver Stone-directed hit film Wall Street, Michael Douglas said “greed, for lack of a better word, is good”. I venture to suggest that Berlin-based artist Julian Rosefeldt, who has created the impressive multiscreen installation Euphoria, would vehemently disagree. Using the musings of more than 100 economists, business magnates, writers and celebrities,…
Mesmerising graphics and non-stop, often helter-skelter, action mark the thrilling new Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, which has no shortage of dark edges. The animated adventure takes off after the events of the Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018). It centres around 15-year-old Miles Morales (voiced by Shameik Moore). Miles’ parents – police officer Jefferson Davis (Brian…
The Blue Caftan is a sensitive and engaging queer themed story. It won the FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes in 2022 and was Morocco’s official entry for the Oscars. The film centres around a middle-aged married couple named Mina (Lubna Azabal) and Halim (Saleh Bakri) who are childless. Mina and Halim run a small sewing shop…
I’ll never understand why Australia’s greatest and most talented singer, John Farnham, never really took off in a big way in the US and the UK . He of course filled in as the front man for Little River Band – who did “make it” abroad – after they dumped Glenn Shorrock. This reverential documentary…
Based on a true story, this is a dramatic recreation of a court case that took place in the French town of Saint Omer in 2016. Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda) is a young mother and Senegalese immigrant who is put on trial for having killed her fifteen months old daughter, supposedly to protect her from…
