Japanese novelist Kotaro Isaka hit on a great formula with his last book, Bullet Train. That was a fast paced, violent and weird battle between a group of idiosyncratic assassins on a train. Bullet Train was influenced by more than a little manga, plenty of early Tarantino and a whole lot of swagger. And while…
– Fences – Only in cinemas from 9 February 2017 We have 10 double in-season passes thanks to Paramount Pictures Australia. *(Tickets valid in Australia only)* Watch the trailer HERE FENCES is the story of Troy Maxson, a mid-century Pittsburgh sanitation worker who once dreamed of a baseball career, but was too old when the…
– Gold – Only in cinemas from 2 February 2017 We have 5 double in-season passes thanks to StudioCanal Australia. *(Tickets valid in Australia only)* Watch the trailer HERE GOLD is the epic tale of one man’s pursuit of the American dream, to discover gold. Kenny Wells (Academy Award® winner Matthew McConaughey) is a modern…
A cast of non-professional autistic actors does a mighty job breathing life into an unconventional love story in Keep the Change. We meet wealthy David (Brandon Polansky) on his first day at Connections, a community for adults with autism. The other attendees confirm he doesn’t belong there … at least that’s the way David feels…
Art and crime have always been strange but frequent bedfellows. From the often-illegal activities of Caravaggio to the sensational art heists of the 20th Century, public fascination with both never seems to wane. And while art crime can be deadly serious, director Roger Michell gives it a comic twist in The Duke. Michell’s films tend…
“I was lucky that I was in the right place at the right time,” says David Stratton, somewhat modestly when reflecting back on his life as one of Australia’s best known and most revered film reviewers. Stratton is the doyen of Australian film reviewers, well known to television audiences through his thirty-year association with fellow…
The films of Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos (Dogtooth) are strange, off-beat, enigmatic, unsettling, confronting, and often hard to fathom, and have divided audiences. The Lobster, his first English language feature film, is no exception, and will probably go down as one of the weirdest films to hit screens this year. It won the Jury Prize…
It is always exciting to see something new from Joanna Murray-Smith and Switzerland did not disappoint. It is a tight 80-minute two-hander based on the character of American crime writer Patricia Highfield – creator of the cool killer Tom Ripley and author of Strangers on a Train, the novel that Alfred Hitchcock made into a…
This tense, claustrophobic thriller cleverly inverts the premise behind such thrillers as Wait Until Dark and Blind Terror, in which a vulnerable blind woman was terrorised by killers until she fought back. Here though it is a blind person who is doing the terrorising. And it is a surprisingly effective thriller that grips until the…
Movies about weddings, with all their inherent potential for high drama and comedy, are a popular choice for both filmmakers and audiences. Top Wedding, directed by Wayne Blair (The Sapphires), should prove a crowd-pleaser in this country although whether it will translate to overseas audiences will be interesting to watch. Marketed as a romantic comedy,…
