Twenty-five years ago Kazunori Yamauchi created the world’s most accurate car racing simulation game: Gran Turismo. He and his team had spent five years perfecting it. Video gamers quickly became obsessed. Then UK marketing executive for Nissan, Danny Moore had a crazy, but revolutionary idea. In Neill Blomkamp’s movie Gran Turismo, Moore (Orlando Bloom), convinces…
Far From Men is set in Algeria in 1954, a time of great unrest and violence as the war for independence from the French is beginning. Daru (played by Viggo Mortensen, from Eastern Promises) is a school teacher in a remote village. But he is charged with the task of escorting the dissident Mohamed (played…
In New York, a crotchety, chain-smoking Chinese-American grandmother gets lucky after leaving a casino … and then all hell breaks loose. Sasie Sealy’s black comedy, Lucky Grandma, places granny in the middle of a turf war between rival gangs. It all starts when Lei Lei the Fortune Teller (Wai Ching Ho) tells Grandma (Tsai Chin)…
Emotion rings true as five supremely talented performers (including the music director) celebrate the extraordinary legacy of American composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim. The breadth of his artistry rings true in a collection of his works that number in excess of 30. I speak of material drawn from noteworthy musicals and some lesser-known works. Mentored…
One of the great whodunnits, Knives Out has a whip-smart script, a stellar cast and a delicious tongue-in-cheek humour. When wealthy crime novelist Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) dies at his estate, the police begin probing. But someone mysteriously also engages debonair Detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) to investigate. The cops and Blanc begin questioning the…
Girl kicks butt and sings a happy tune. That about sums up Disney’s latest foray into fantasy, this time into the Pacific Islands. Moana is an animated feature about an adventurous teenager who sails away from home on a daring mission to save her people. The title character is the 16-year-old daughter of the chief…
George Bernard Shaw wrote Saint Joan, in 1923, six scenes and an epilogue. Imara Savage, the Director of this production, has ambitiously taken many liberties with the original text. This Sydney Theatre Company production of Saint Joan occupies the stage for one hour and forty-five minutes, straight through, without an interval. A great deal of…
The hype has been enormous, but does Barbie, the movie, live up to expectations? Well, some elements do and others not so much. The film is populated by the Barbies and Kens of Barbieland, where women rule the roost and men trail in their wake. The chief Ken (bleach blonde Ryan Gosling, with a six-pack…
Not as ambitious in scope and scale as his previous film Boyhood, which was filmed over a period of twelve years, Richard Linklater’s latest film has been touted as “a spiritual sequel” to his 1993 slacker classic Dazed And Confused. While steeped in a strong sense of nostalgia for the early 80s, it also explores…
The excitement I felt while watching One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) – a pivotal movie in my formative years – came flooding back while watching Unsane. A smart young woman seeks help after a stalker has made her life miserable for two years. But she’s inadvertently admitted to a private psychiatric hospital. The…
