I don’t know about you but I’ve felt a bit jaded going to the movies lately. I mean, there’s only so many explosions, car/boat/spacecraft chases or unlikely romances a person can take. Which is to say, if you want an antidote to all that, you really should consider the terrific French thriller November. Co-writer and…
The latest film from Brandon Cronenberg (son of legendary Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg) is a hybrid mix of sci-fi, horror and trenchant social commentary. He takes on class, wealth, privilege, artistic conceits, power, western decadence, guilt and the breakdown of civilization. It comes across like a fevered, darker and more transgressive variation on the recent…
A couple of bumbling, small time crims luck out in the farcical comedy The Wrong Horse. I speak of best mates Noddy (Darren Mort) and Big Ears (Dom Phelan). Big Ears – who has a “wind” issue – is forever sponging off Noddy … dropping in at his place all hours of the day and night, drinking…
Based on the novel Text for You by Sofie Cramer, Jim Strouse’s (The Incredible Jessica James) Love Again is a fantasy dramedy, where everything is carefully manufactured to get to the outcome you know is coming. That, of course, involves inevitable bumps along the road. Naturally, it’s the journey that counts – at least from…
Sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll. That may well be the signature tune for 19-year-old unemployed, reckless, gay Australian Ari (Danny Ball), except that his “poison” is grunge and hip-hop. Ari is drawn to Melbourne’s gay clubs, unprotected sex, hard drugs (it is dead set easy to get hold of stuff) and thumping music. He distances and denounces…
Book Club: The Next Chapter is a feel-good sequel to the 2018 film Book Club. It concerns the ongoing fate of the four women at the centre of the original as they undertake a special girls’ trip. Vivian (Jane Fonda), perpetually single, has just been asked for her hand in marriage by her long-term, suave…
A brilliant slice of musical theatre, Once has an inspiring, ear and eye pleasing balance of heart and humour. Based on the 2007 movie by John Carney, it concerns a struggling Irish musician on the verge of giving up and an effervescent Czech woman. The latter (Stefanie Caccamo) sees the guy (Toby Francis), guitar in hand, singing…
American writer Dennis Lehane burst onto the crime scene with his hard-hitting debut A Drink Before the War (1994), the first of his Kenzie and Gennaro novels. That series probably hit its apex with one of Lehane’s best-known books (thanks to the movie version), Gone Baby Gone. These books, along with the standalone Mystic River,…
Writer-director Elegance Bratton’s own story of overcoming fierce odds to become a US marine inspired his film The Inspection. We’re in New Jersey in 2005 and 25-year-old Ellis French (Jeremy Pope) leads a threadbare existence. Estranged from his mother, Inez (Gabrielle Union), he’s been on his own since the age of 16 and the one…
Four elderly women head off on a road trip to the 2017 Superbowl in Texas in support of their idol Tom Brady – the famed quarterback for the New England Patriots regarded as one of the greatest players in the history of the NFL. Another of those films which delight in seeing older folk kick…
