Victorian-era detective fiction gets turned on its head in Nexflix’s charming Enola Holmes. Based on the YA novels of Nancy Springer, this engaging – if a bit muddled – film sees the legendary Sherlock Holmes sidelined in favour of his precocious little sister. Throw in more than a liberal dose of danger, a foppish love…
I saw a movie called G-Loc a while ago. And my first thought now was: “Why not try another SF?” [*sci-fi – ed.]. Not only because it’s one of my favorite genres. But because G-Loc was horrible and a disappointment in every way. And I wanted to forget this ordeal as soon as possible by…
The Devil All the Time is a sprawling and multi-layered Southern Gothic tale of good and evil. The film offers a rich tapestry of amoral and unsavoury characters and explores that potent nexus between religion, sex and violence, fate and faith. The atypical and nonlinear narrative spans a couple of decades between the end of…
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…
