Jim Jarmusch is like a cinematic magpie. His filmography includes a Western (Dead Man), a samurai movie (Ghost Dog), a rock doco (Year of the Horse) and a vampire movie (Only Lovers Left Alive). So what does the director who’s done just about everything do next? Why a zombie movie of course! And The Dead…
I got a lump in my throat when I watched Teresa Palmer – as Michelle Payne – cross the line to become the first female jockey to win the Melbourne Cup. That’s despite remembering a great deal about that fateful day on the first Tuesday in November 2015. I was concerned that knowledge might detract…
It’s nearly forty years since Sylvester Stallone first shed blood as Rambo, the former Vietnam veteran and special services soldier who ran afoul of a redneck sheriff in the 1982 film First Blood. The character of Rambo was created by author David Morrell in the 1972 novel of the same name. The novel also explored…
Heart of Darkness in space anyone? Director James Gray (The Lost City of Z) and star Brad Pitt go boldly where Kubrick, Coppola and Tarkovsky have been before in Ad Astra. This quietly powerful contemplation on fathers, sons and the final frontier won’t appeal to everyone, but it gets top marks for asking the big…
School holidays have arrived around Australia – and that means lots of kids saying “I’m bored!”. Kid-friendly movies make a great outing though, and with that in mind, here are our quick reviews of three. They all opened on 19 September 2019. Dora and the Lost City of Gold (PG) The cartoon TV series Dora…
Good Boys is Superbad with 11 year-olds. The film follows the misadventures of Max (fresh-faced Jacob Tremblay), a sixth-grader on the cusp of adolescence. He’s best friends with Thor (Brady Noon) and Lucas (Keith L Williams), who refer to themselves as “the beanbag boys” because they like sitting in bean bags. Max has been invited…
Scheming and gossip abound in the lavish big-screen version of Downton Abbey, where opulence is the byword. First an admission, I only heard wonderful things about the TV series but I haven’t seen one episode. As a result, it took me some time to work out who was who in the zoo, namely who the…
In the animated comedy The Angry Birds Movie 2, three flightless angry birds and the scheming green piggies take their beef to the next level as both Bird Island and Piggy Island are in danger. So, Red (Jason Sudeikis), Chuck (Josh Gad), Bomb (Danny McBride) and Mighty Eagle (Peter Dinklage) recruit Chuck’s sister Silver (Rachel…
How long can you party for? When is it time to stop the music and take greater care and responsibility for the rest of your life? Laura (Holliday Grainger) and Tyler (Alia Shawkat) have been flatmates and besties for 10 years. They maraud around the streets of Dublin, rejecting the expectations that bombard modern women…
The late, great Aretha Franklin was affectionately known as “the Queen of Soul”. She was one of the biggest selling female artists an topped the charts with a string of number one hits like “Respect”, “Think”, and “Spanish Harlem”. But in 1972 she took the radical step of returning to her roots and recorded an…
