There’s one word that comes to my mind after watching Mad Max: Fury Road, and that’s the word “madness”. This is a perfect visualization of what the term madness means. I truly believe that the creators and writers of this hallucinatory trip were fed with hallucinogens. A spacious cocktail of exotic mushrooms, barbiturates and other…
I lost track of the Terminator franchise long ago. I think it was after Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003). And since that film logically tied off the loose ends, I was comfortable with it finishing there. But then we had the weak and divergent Terminator Salvation (2009) and Terminator Genisys (2015). I’d stopped…
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…
Ten years on, the little family of four in Zombieland: Double Tap are still doing what worked well when the zombie apocalypse first occurred. The rules of survival haven’t changed, though they may have been added to over all the years that Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) and sisters Little Rock (Abigail Breslin) and…
Sometimes a book knocks you off your feet and into a completely alien environment – no, I’m not talking sci-fi, but Michael Mohammed Ahmad’s The Lebs. I grew up in Sydney in the same timeframe as this book, but Ahmad’s Sydney is like nothing I’ve ever experienced. ‘Bani Adam thinks he’s better than us!’ they…
Melissa McCarthy tackles one of the best roles of her life in this hilarious homage to James Bond. Susan Cooper (McCarthy) is an overweight, unassuming, deskbound CIA analyst and the unsung hero behind the Agency’s most dangerous missions. But when her super smooth partner Bradley Fine (Jude Law) falls off the grid and another top…
Co-written by Marie Drucker and director Stephane Brize, Out of Season is a sensitive, slow-moving romance. Mathieu (Guillaume Canet) is a famous Parisian movie star, married to a prime-time news anchor. Four weeks before making his stage debut, Mathieu gets cold feet and pulls out, leaving everyone in the lurch. While he knows his withdrawal…
Provocative from the opening scene, Afterglow sets out to push the envelope. It starts with shadow play of a heated ménage à trois between three buff men, two in their 30s and one in his 20s. Thereafter, the play features full frontal nudity and steamy shower scenes. Yes, a real shower with an imposingly large…
The opening night of Opera Australia’s spectacular staging of Verdi’s dramatic opera Aida was blighted by a major technical failure. The surtitles, which were to appear above the stage and translate the lyrics into English, were nowhere to be seen for the first 20 minutes or so. So, if you didn’t happen to know the story you…
Like most everybody else, I first discovered The Shins in that great scene in the coming of age movie Garden State (2004) where Zach Braff’s character tries on the headphones of Natalie Portman to hear a brief snippet of the song “New Slang,” from the band’s 2001 debut album, Oh, Inverted World. That exposure worked…
