Movies about music have had a rough trot recently. From the sugary Trolls: World Tour to the super-serious Echo in the Canyon, for me at least, few have inspired (except maybe Bill & Ted Face the Music). Now director Nisha Gantara (Late Night) dives into a music industry fantasy/rom-com with The High Note. But the…
Kids may find more than adults in the far-fetched children’s fantasy Four Kids and It. Thirteen year-old Ros (Teddie Malleson-Allen) is a bookworm, with aspirations of becoming a writer. But she’s yet to find her own voice. She, and her younger brother, Robbie (Billy Jenkins), are good kids – being brought up by their British…
What is it about Buffalo? The city on the shore of Lake Erie in western New York seems to provoke an uneasy blend of love and loathing in its residents – at least the ones who make movies. Like Vincent Gallo’s Buffalo 66, Buffaloed (a prologue explains the title) from Tanya Wexler mixes a fierce…
Are you an Agatha Christie fan? Does nothing get you going quite like a drawing room mystery? If you said yes, then Régis Roinsard’s stylish mystery The Translators (Les traducteurs) will be catnip for you. But Roinsard and his screenwriting collaborators Daniel Presley and Romain Compingt give the genre a modern sheen with a comprehensive…
Secrets of the past hang over Yuval Adler’s drama, The Secrets We Keep. Maja (Noomi Rapace) suffers from her experiences as a Romanian gypsy during World War II. To this point she’s kept the dark secret to herself. She’s forged a new life with her husband, Lewis (Chris Messina) – a GP – and young…
Talk about getting yourself into a pickle. In the decidedly quirky An American Pickle, Herschel Greenbaum (Seth Rogen) certainly does in more ways than one. It is 1919 and Herschel is digging ditches for a living in Eastern Europe in a fictional place called Schlupsk. When he sets eyes upon Sarah (Sarah Snook) it’s love…
The ST. ALi Italian Film Festival is back and will screen (hopefully) nationally from 29 September. The flagship event will showcase Italian culture, stories and language in Sydney, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide, Canberra and Byron Bay at reduced capacity and then in Melbourne, when restrictions permit. The festival opens with a new live-action version of the…
Things no one will say about Charlie Kaufman’s new film, I’m Thinking of Ending Things: “Aww, that was sweet”; “What a cliched Hollywood ending”; “That movie made total sense”. Kaufman’s latest excursion into weirdness is almost Bergman-esque in its inscrutability. Indeed, it shares more than a little DNA with Bergman’s classic Persona (1966). But as…
A D-grade horror thriller featuring bad acting and a wafer-thin plot, Becky boasts four particularly gory scenes. Senior school student Becky (Lulu Wilson) is doing it tough. She was close to her mum who died of cancer and she refuses to engage with her father, Jeff (Joel McHale). Now Jeff drops a bombshell, telling Becky…
The sensitive and affecting film Adam takes a close up look at two women from a poor Casablanca neighbourhood caught in an emotional maelstrom. Abla (Lubna Azabal) is a dour widowed mother who can’t get over the untimely death of her husband. Meanwhile, Samia (Nisrin Erradi) faces the imminent birth of a child alone and…
