Timothy Spall looks nothing like most of the characters he’s played – and yet like all of them. The acclaimed actor is stylishly dressed, even sporting a light jacket despite the oppressive heat outside. He’s a man who seems comfortable in his own skin. Polite and thoughtful, he’s very much the image of a leading…
This low budget female centric film from director Jonny Leahy, a recent VCA graduate, is an honest and comical urban comedy/drama looking at the developing friendship between two troubled young women from different backgrounds. Leah (newcomer Zara Zoe) is a young woman who has been diagnosed with terminal melanoma, who has a chance encounter with…
Lady Bird and the Fox by Kim Kelly is one of the best historical fiction titles I’ve read in a long time, a claim boosted by the familiarity I felt with the setting (not far from where I grew up). This is the blurb: It’s 1868 and the gold rush is spreading across the wild…
It’s been a while since we last had a full-scale disaster movie (think Armaggedon, Independence Day), so why not a homegrown product (it was shot on the Gold Coast) starring the man-mountain The Rock? Lawrence (Paul Giamatti) is a seismologist with a nose for big earthquakes and one is about to hit the USA between…
This is the second documentary in as many weeks to hit our screens exploring an indigenous community and the way in which their traditions and culture have been affected by the white man’s ways. We recently had David Gulpilil take us to his home town of Ramingining in the Northern Territory for the revealing and…
I am a great fan of Dead Puppet Society. It has walkways intrigued me with dark tales and clever puppetry combined with the human element to create fascinating entertainment. But Argus, designed and directed by David Morton, is something completely different and challenging. There were no giant puppets, or mysterious figures behind doors, in fact…
A violent buddy action-comedy with a fierce soundtrack, The Hitman’s Bodyguard plays on its irreverence. Nearly everybody notoriously lethal hit man Darius Kincaid (Samuel L. Jackson) has ever met wants him dead. But that will only happen if Michael Bryce (Ryan Reynolds) – the bodyguard recruited to protect him – doesn’t shoot him first … out of sheer…
Australians who grew up during the era in which Riptides is set may recognize a heck of a lot of their own experiences; the long road trips on rubbish roads, the relentless heat, Bali (even as it was back then), perhaps even turning on the TV at Christmas time to news of the devastation wrought…
Focus is another of those heist caper crime films about a clever and charismatic con man, and it adheres closely to the familiar formula followed by films like Ocean’s Eleven and its sequels, Ridley Scott’s Matchstick Men. These films are all about misdirection, and the audience sees what they want to see. But ever since…
The powerful Australian produced and shot drama Shayda is set in suburban Australia in 1995 but has contemporary resonance as it deals with some important themes. It centres around Shayda (Iranian actress Zar Amir Ebrahimi) who is married to Hossein (Osama Sami) who has moved to Australia to study medicine and become a doctor. He…
