Photo by Krists Luhaers on Unsplash Despite some dire rumblings, the Australian cinema scene posted a respectable 2024. According to Screen Australia, overall attendances showed a small rise of around 200,000 on 2023 – from 57.9 million to 58.1 million. The gross box office however grew about 5%, from $940 million to $985 million. This…
British author Francis Spufford travels to America in 1922 for his latest novel, Cahokia Jazz, but it is not an America that readers will know. The alternative world of Cahokia Jazz is one in which smallpox did not decimate the indigenous population of the North America. As a result, when European settlers started to arrive…
REBEL is a musical that delves into one man’s journey to discover his true self. It is an exploration of family, community, music and being queer in the USA in the 1940s to 1960s. The story is set in a New York bar in 1969, where cowboy Davey (Maxwell Simon) narrates his life as a…
– Their Finest – Only in cinemas from 20 April 2017 We have 5 double in-season passes thanks to Transmission Films. *(Tickets valid in Australia only)* Watch the trailer HERE With London emptied of men now fighting at the Front, Catrin Cole lands herself a job writing copy for propaganda films that need “a woman’s touch”. Her…
Accountability is behind the twisted Agatha Christie tale And Then There Were None. Eight people are invited to a luxurious island retreat off the coast of Devon, but when they arrive their supposed hosts are not there to greet them. Attending to them are a butler, Rogers (Grant Piro), and his wife, a cook, Mrs…
Comedies featuring strong women can be funny and risqué like Bridesmaids or patchy and disappointing such as Like a Boss. Best friends forever Mia (Tiffany Haddish) and Mel (Rose Byrne) are both happily single. They live together and one even puts toothpaste on the other’s toothbrush. They run their own small cosmetics company – a…
Any film based on a book usually has to sacrifice certain elements to get all the plot points in place. Otherwise, there’s just no way to put several hundred pages of story into a 90 – 120 minute screen work. But aficionados of Delia Owens’s enormously popular book, Where the Crawdads Sing, seem to agree…
A New Zealand fundamentalist church is under the spotlight in Gloriavale. The Christian community, located at Haupiri, north-west of Christchurch, is home to about 600 people from 70 families. Neville Cooper, who changed his name to Hopeful Christian, founded it in 1969. It stands accused of using slave labour and exploiting women and children. The…
In Harry Macqueen’s Supernova, Sam (Colin Firth) is a classical pianist, and his partner Tusker (Stanley Tucci) is a writer. Now middle-aged, the couple have been together for decades. They know how to press each other’s buttons, but are still very much in love. One day they decide to dust off the old camper van…
In Escaped Alone, society as we know it has fallen apart. Survivors are few. Four older women who are among the lucky ones reflect on times past over several summers … as the years run into one another. Vi (Margaret Mills) went to jail for six years after killing her husband. Sally (Caroline Lee) has…
