Not to be confused with The Handmaid’s Tale — Margaret Atwood’s Booker Prize nominated dystopian novel with a strong feminist slant, which was filmed in 1990 with Natasha Richardson and Faye Dunaway — The Handmaiden is a loose adaptation of Sarah Waters’ Booker Prize nominated novel Fingersmith, which was set in Victorian England, and offers…
Shocking imagery assaults the senses in Kangaroo: A Love-Hate Story. This documentary tackles the way we treat our national symbol. Is the kangaroo a saint or a sinner, a boon or a burden? Those questions are at the heart of the film. It clearly takes the side of those who suggest we’ve treated the marsupial…
Smile is a genuinely scary and engaging psychological horror movie. It centres around a hard-working therapist in an emergency psychiatric unit, named Dr Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon). As Dr Cotter is about to leave the facility after a particularly long shift, a young graduate student Laura Weaver (Caitlin Stasey) enters shaking and clearly traumatised. In…
Director Francis Lawrence re-teams with star Jennifer Lawrence (no relation) for Red Sparrow. But where their previous success were in the YA-friendly Hunger Games trilogy, this film is a far darker – and more adult – proposition. Lawrence (the director) has given his lead actor an intricately crafted spy thriller in which to strut her…
Which Way Home is a play by Katie Beckett. It is a kind of ‘love letter’ to her father. She wanted, she writes in the program notes to the production, ‘to give him something so he knows how special he is and what he means to me.’ Set in a car on a road journey…
The internet features prominently in the compelling new psychological thriller Missing from writer-directors Will Merrick and Nicholas Johnson. The film starts in San Antonio on April 13th, 2008. As caught on video camera, a father, James (Tim Griffin), is playing with his young daughter June (Ava Lee) when a trickle of blood is seen coming…
Featuring 22 tracks from ABBA, Mamma Mia! The Musical is bright, breezy, energetic and heaps of good-natured fun. Whenever it returns, it always goes down a treat and I never tire of seeing it. The show premiered in Oz on the 9th June 2001 and played for four years to more than 2.2 million people in eight…
It’s the time of year when serious Oscar contenders swamp our screens. But sometimes it’s good just to sit back, disengage your brain and indulge in something silly. For that, there’s Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle. This is a faux-sequel to 1995’s Jumanji, a film perhaps nostalgically remembered as better than it actually was. The nostalgia…
Let me start in a cheeky and derogatory tone. Let’s take Jack Sparrow, promote him to be an eloquent university professor teaching literature and tell him that he’s terminally ill. If you watch the movie The Professor (the original movie title was ‘Richard Says Goodbye‘) with a dismissive attitude, you could utter such a statement….
Political correctness is turned on its head in the lighthearted New Zealand comedy, The Breaker Upperers. But the movie is set to polarise audiences. Fifteen years ago, Mel (Madeleine Sami) and Jen (Jackie Van Beek) discovered they were being two-timed by the same man. Bitter and cynical, they became fast friends. The pair then formed The…
