Liam Neeson’s new action thriller Ice Road is as a cross between reality series Ice Road Truckers and Henri-Georges Clouzot’s tense 1953 drama The Wages of Fear. If you’re not familiar, in The Wages of Fear, a group of men were hired to transport a shipment of volatile nitroglycerine through treacherous mountain passes and across…
To call Steve Cavanagh’s Eddie Flynn thrillers “courtroom dramas” is to sell them well short. Sure there are some courtroom or other legal shenanigans in every one of Eddie’s outings. But what Cavanagh seems to delight in is how much pressure he can bring to bear on Eddie outside of the case itself. In his…
For quite a while now, Disney/Pixar has “owned” the animation space. The decline of Dreamworks Animation has left the field basically open to them. But competitors are emerging, including (relatively) smaller player Sony Pictures Animation. Their first animated musical, Vivo, is a swing for the fences. Vivo sees the storied Lin-Manuel Miranda (In the Heights)…
In the 90s Renny Harlin was arguably the premier director of out-and-out action films. Die Hard 2, Cliffhanger and The Long Kiss Goodnight are all his. Since then though his reputation has suffered with a succession of lower budget B-grade films and television work. His latest film is unlikely to restore his reputation though. The…
I hope comic book fans find more to appreciate about James Gunn’s (Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2) take on The Suicide Squad than I did. I found it a garbled, at times incoherent, mess. The US government is secretly engaging the services of hardened criminals with “special skills” (read: killing). They go on perilous…
Topher Grace? Whatever happened to that guy? Well, in 2021, Home Economics happened to him. It’s not like he hasn’t been doing anything (remember BlackKkKlansman?) but his profile is a little lower than it was in his That 70s Show heyday. Home Economics is a perfectly fine but not particularly memorable series about a dysfunctional…
Rivers Solomon describes themselves on their website as follows: Rivers Solomon is a dyke, an anarchist, a she-beast, an exile, a shiv, a wreck, and a refugee of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Fae writes about life in the margins, where fae’s much at home. So it is perhaps unsurprising that Vern, the protagonist of her…
The slow-moving period piece Fanny Lye Deliver’d is a film mired in pain. The year is 1657. The place: Shropshire, in the West Midlands region of England. Fanny Lye (Maxine Peake) is a hard-working farmer’s wife, living a life of Puritan stricture. Her husband, John (Charles Dance), is a cruel former army captain returned from…
Jungle Cruise benefits from the talents of Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt. This old fashioned, far-fetched adventure fantasy is based on a Disneyland attraction that’s been operating since 1955. Set at the height of World War I, the film concerns a long-standing hunt for an elixir with remarkable healing powers. English botanist Dr Lily Houghton…
– The Ice Road – Only in cinemas from 12 August 2021 We have 5 double in-season passes thanks to Rialto Distribution. *(Tickets valid in Australia only)* Watch the trailer HERE In a diamond mine in northern Canada that operates under an ongoing threat of combustible methane gas, a spark ignites causing an explosion, leaving…
