Turning Agatha Christie murder mysteries into popular cinema is proving quite lucrative. So it’s not surprising that for the third time Kenneth Branagh has teamed with writer Michael Green to adapt Christie’s late (1969) novel Hallowe’en Party for A Haunting in Venice. The unsettling supernatural thriller follows the success of Murder on the Orient Express…
What expectations do you have when you’re going to see a disaster movie such as San Andreas? Obviously you’re looking forward to see how a metropolis like San Francisco is reduced to an immense mess, strewn with rubble and twisted steel. Immense skyscrapers collapsing like a house of cards and tumbling down one after the…
Food, sex and art are three of the key ingredients in Flux Gourmet. This is the latest bizarre cinematic concoction from British director Peter Strickland, who’s based in Hungary. This black comedy is an absurdist satire of the contemporary art world with its provocateurs, sycophantic backers and receptive audiences and the creative process itself. Over…
I unashamedly love the way Woody Allen weaves such colourful and engaging stories on screen and also generates some great acting performances. This one concerns an alcohol-riddled, womanising, professor of philosophy called Abe (Joaquin Phoenix), held in the highest regard for his academic achievements, but who has lost all meaning in his life. That is…
The popular Agatha Christie play The Mousetrap has been a constant tourist drawcard in London since it was first performed in 1952, meaning that perhaps the whodunit’s biggest mystery is how the show is not outdated. Australian audiences can determine this for themselves in the latest on-tour production of the West End version of the…
From the outset we just know the contention in the action-crime thriller Free Fire is one set to explode and it will inevitably end badly. Suspicion, ego and, above all, greed stand in the way of a cadre of crims in Massachusetts in the late ‘70s. That they are on opposing sides is almost of…
– Kraven The Hunter – Only in cinemas from 12 December 2024 We have 5 double in-season passes thanks to Sony Pictures. *(Tickets valid in Australia only)* Watch the trailer HERE Kraven the Hunter is the action-packed, standalone story of how one of Marvel’s most iconic villains came to be. Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays Kraven, a…
Filmmaker Guy Ritchie gathers together most of his usual band of players for Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre. And this action-packed but cliched globe-trotting spy movie ticks all the right boxes for the genre. When a mysterious device (the film’s MacGuffin) is stolen from a secret laboratory MI6 needs to act quickly to recover it…
Australian lawyer, journalist and comedian James O’Loghlin draws on his time as a legal aid lawyer in the 1990s as the basis of his new novel Criminals. The book revolves around three characters, connected by an armed robbery, an event which causes each of them to reconsider their lives and move in new directions. Dean…
Kim Lock’s first novel, Peace, Love and Khaki Socks, is an intelligent and worthwhile novel about birth choices. Her second, Like I Can Love, highlights how talented and versatile this author is. Here’s the blurb: On a hot January afternoon, Fairlie Winter receives a phone call. Her best friend has just taken her own life. Jenna Rudolph,…
