Another week, another reboot of a defunct film franchise. This time it is The Transporter series, which was first created by Luc Besson in 2002. Besson is the French filmmaker who makes kinetically exciting, fast paced but formulaic Euro thrillers and vapid Hollywood-style action movies like Lucy, Kiss Of The Dragon, etc. But it’s been…
Australia has doesn’t seem to have had the plethora of famous serial killers that America has. As a result, few characters loom larger in the Australian consciousness than Ivan Milat – the so-called ‘Backpacker Murderer’. Milat’s crimes were uncovered when bodies were found in the Belanglo State Forest a few hours south of Sydney. In…
Perhaps you are bit late to the party and have not yet powered through this most clever and British of TV series. You may think that reading a quick online review of the first season might get you up to speed fast enough but we wouldn’t want to rob you of the absolute pleasure that…
Twist is contemporary take on Charles Dickens’ classic Oliver Twist. Dickens’ tale followed a poor orphan boy lured into life of crime under the control of the elderly rogue Fagin. Twist updates the setting from the grim and bleak streets of Victorian era London to the sleek glass and concrete structures of modern-day London. In…
Based on fact, but filling in the blanks with some licence, Detroit centres on the Detroit riots of 1967. The summer of that year was a pivotal moment in modern American history. The country was beset by growing political and social upheaval. The escalating US military engagement in Vietnam and decades of racial injustice and repression feulled the…
One of my favorite musical scenes in film is that long opening sequence at the beginning of the movie Once, where you can hear Glen Hansard playing guitar and singing while the camera tracks along the dark streets of Dublin before settling on the singer/songwriter busking in front of a storefront. Knowing that Hansard’s career…
There’s only one word to describe award winner crime writer Chris Whitaker’s new novel All the Colours of the Dark: epic. It is an intimate epic, focussing on two characters from a small town in the United States. But the narrative ranges over forty years of their lives and the investigation into a series of…
An epic and intense tale of bravery in the lead up to and during the First World War, War Horse focuses on the trials and tribulations of a chestnut animal named Joey and on those who come into contact with him. When it was first performed on stage, in London in October 2007, War Horse…
Balsam Karam’s The Singularity (translated by Saskia Vogel) is a quietly devastating book about displacement and loss, and the tribulations faced by refugees. It revolves around two stories of two very different mothers. In doing so, Karam is able to range across a range of experiences of people displaced from their homes. In what is…
A deeply distressing reality piece, Capharnaum pulls at the heart strings. The title translates to chaos and that’s what this film is about – surviving amid chaos. Zain (Zain Al Raffa) is a mistreated 12-year-old Lebanese boy. After being jailed for committing a violent crime, Zain sues his parents – mother Souad (Kawthar Al Bankole)…
