France’s nomination for Best Foreign Language Film at this year’s Oscars, Mustang is, not surprisingly, a riveting drama about five beautiful Turkish girls whose lives are turned to hell by age-old practices. It is the start of the summer. In a remote village in the north of Turkey, Lale and her four older sisters come…
Following the award-winning Cormac Riley crime fiction series set in Ireland, Australian crime author Dervla McTiernan turned her attention to the United States. Her first novel set there was The Murder Rule, a courtroom/crime thriller based around the Innocence Project which was not all that successful. Her follow up, What Happened to Nina?, is something…
Not to be confused with the 1987 comedy of the same name that starred a young John Cusack, this unoriginal and lacklustre action comedy is largely a female centric variation on the odd couple on the run, buddy cop, road movie formula that has driven films like the superior Midnight Run and 48 Hours and…
A slow-moving, intense jigsaw puzzle, a mood of unease permeates nearly every scene in UNA. Based on David Harrower’s Olivier Award-winning one-act play Blackbird, the film follows a young woman’s journey to reclaim her past. Fifteen years ago, 13-year-old Una ran away with and had sex with an older man, Ray – a crime for which…
Chilean director Sebastian Lelio makes films that deal with strong female characters. His previous film, Gloria, offered a sympathetic and honest portrait of a middle-aged woman looking for love in contemporary Santiago. He handled the material with a sense of compassion and respect. Those same qualities are evident in his fifth feature film, A Fantastic…
Olivia Ruggiero is talented. No doubt about it. She is operatic and she is adept at musical theatre, but at times there is a struggle between the two. I noted that very early on in Broadway Diva, when she sang a medley of show tunes. The operatic tended to overwhelm what I would call traditional musical theatre and…
Tessa Ensler (Sheridan Harbridge) is a successful barrister. She knows the tricks of the trade and defends her clients – many alleged sexual offenders – vehemently. She relishes the game … circling witnesses until she is ready to pounce, having lulled them into a false sense of security. She is good … very good. Those who know her,…
The 2016 AICE Israeli Film Festival is currently in full swing in Sydney and Melbourne ( at the Ritz and Nova cinemas respectively). The event aims to present a diverse range of films from Israel in a variety of genres – including romantic comedies, a Holocaust mystery, a Bedouin family drama, a Polish/Israeli horror film…
Patricia Marques’ debut The Colours of Death is a successful genre mash. Marques has taken a down-the-line crime procedural, mixed it with a well imagined alternative world in which some people are ‘gifted’ with specific powers and set it on the very real streets of Lisbon. All anchored by a strong, flawed and despite her…
Cults, brainwashing and exploitation seem to go hand-in-glove. So it is that a young woman, Lisa – played convincingly by Hayley Worsley – a tried and true member of a sect with Eastern leanings, practising spiritualism and free love, finds herself in the hands of a deprogrammer, Mel (Tim Ferris) in Heretics. Lisa agrees to…
