Around 200 movies were commercially released in Australia in 2015 (more if you live in Sydney or Melbourne; less if you’re in a regional or country area); and as these things go, it was a pretty good year. The range of films – from predictable superhero blockbusters to surprising indie fare – provided at least…
By now just about everybody is aware that Lance Armstrong’s historic seven wins in the iconic and gruelling Tour De France were tainted by drugs and the use of elaborate masking agents; especially after his frank and revealing confession in an extended interview with Oprah Winfrey. And anyone who saw Alex Gibney’s detailed and well…
There are some writers who never do the same thing twice. Two books is probably not enough to say there is a pattern, but it was a surprise to find the follow up to Adam Oyebanji’s space opera debut Braking Day is a contemporary murder mystery with a bit of spy thriller thrown in for…
Slapstick humour abounds in MTC’s revival of Noel Coward’s outrageous comedy Hay Fever. Set in an English country house in the 1920s, the play deals with the four eccentric members of the Bliss family and their outlandish behaviour. Each invites a guest to spend the weekend, without initially telling the others. Sorel (Imogen Sage) and…
A creepy, well-made horror movie, Hatching bites. Young gymnastics student Tinja appears to have the perfect Finnish family. At least her social media obsessed mother wants the outside world to believe that. It is all about perfect smiles and beautiful things. She is also one of those pushy parents who desperately wants her daughter to…
American remakes of European movies perhaps don’t have the best track record. But Bart Freundlich’s After the Wedding – a re-working of Susanne Bier’s 2006 Danish film of the same title* – mostly succeeds thanks to some clever writing, sharp direction and fine acting. The action is transplanted from Copenhagen to New York; but the…
Following his work on X-Men: Days of Future Past, director Bryan Singer takes the reigns again on X-Men: Apocalypse, in which the X-Men battle the original and most powerful mutant, known as Apocalypse. It was Singer who kicked off the successful X-Men franchise in 2000, followed by the blockbuster X2 in 2003. But back to the storyline…
Imagine if we lived in but one version of the world and there were other incarnations. What would be the benefits and the dangers? That mind-bending contention is at the heart of the low budget Australian sci-fi drama, The Gateway. Physicist and researcher Jane Chandler (Jacqueline McKenzie) is happily married to writer, Matt (Myles Pollard)….
Frozen meets Shrek in Onward, the latest adventure from the Disney-Pixar stable. The hype around this film has been understandably muted; but even though it’s a little “off”, it still delivers exactly what most audiences will want. Like Shrek, the Onward is set in a kind of split dimension in which the world of fantasy…
“If at first you don’t succeed, lie, lie again…” The characters of Perpetual Wake churn out lie after lie when challenged, as effortlessly as they stomp and strut all over the stage, diving in and out of the present and of the fictional world of a novel that may or not be the next greatest…
