Disney enlists Lin-Manuel Miranda for Encanto, an animated family adventure that comes off a bit like In the Heights transplanted to rural Colombia. While this is a film filled with colour and energy, its rather muddled plot and lashings of treacle diminished its impact for me. Jared Bush, Byron Howard and Charise Castro Smith share…
Around 200 movies were commercially released in Australia in 2015 (more if you live in Sydney or Melbourne; less if you’re in a regional or country area); and as these things go, it was a pretty good year. The range of films – from predictable superhero blockbusters to surprising indie fare – provided at least…
The Sunday Girl by Pip Drysdale – this snappy, fast-paced debut thriller hooked me in right from the outset and kept me on tenterhooks. Here’s the blurb: Any woman who’s ever been involved with a bad, bad man and been dumped will understand what it feels like to be broken, broken-hearted and bent on revenge….
Like his style or not, Spike Lee always has something to say. His latest epic (clocking in at 2 and a half hours), Da 5 Bloods, is no exception. This sprawling exploration of the ties that bind was originally slated for a cinema release; but COVID-19 scotched that. So Lee has released the film on…
Killing Ground is part of a long tradition of Australian cinema, which delves into our sense of unease in our own backyard. When young urbanites Ian (Ian Meadows) and Sam (Tiarnie Coupland) go camping, they arrive at their isolated destination to discover a tent already set up, but no sign of its owners. With the other campers at…
Balsam Karam’s The Singularity (translated by Saskia Vogel) is a quietly devastating book about displacement and loss, and the tribulations faced by refugees. It revolves around two stories of two very different mothers. In doing so, Karam is able to range across a range of experiences of people displaced from their homes. In what is…
Award winning Irish author Sebastian Barry deals with the stain on his country’s soul in his latest book Old God’s Time. But he does it in a roundabout way, taking his time to get there and delivering plenty of regret and tragedy along the way. It is the mid-1990s and Tom Kettle is a retired…
A dark family secret explodes in Joachim Lafosse’s disturbing drama A Silence. Astrid Schaar (Emmanuelle Devos) has said nothing about the deeply disquieting matter for 30 years, but a figure from the past triggers massive concern. Astrid’s renowned, media-savvy lawyer husband Francois (Daniel Auteuil) has been fighting an incendiary, high-profile case for five years. He…
Kathryn Ledson serves an ace with the third book in her Erica Jewell series, Grand Slam. Released just in time for the Australian Open 2016 (thinking that was a marketing decision with some foresight), the book features all sorts of shenanigans on and off the tennis court … basically, wherever Erica Jewell happens to be. If…
Who would have thought that the formation of McDonald’s would make for such an eye-catching yarn? As told in The Founder, it is a forceful drama that tells the true story of how Ray Kroc, a salesman from Illinois, met Mac and Dick McDonald, who were running a burger operation in 1950s Southern California. Impressed…
