Twenty years ago Lee Tamahori gave us one of the best films to come out of New Zealand with Once Were Warriors, an exploration of masculinity, violence, family and Maori pride. After spending over a decade working overseas with actors of the calibre of Anthony Hopkins, Morgan Freeman and Nicolas Cage on large scale big…
Dev Patel makes his directorial debut with Monkey Man, a gritty, graphically violent, and brutal revenge thriller. The film follows the adventures of an enigmatic and taciturn character known only as “Kid”, who fights against the corruption and social injustice rife in contemporary India. Patel also plays the anonymous antihero, a kid who grew up…
Britain’s Supergrass ran their course in the 90’s and 00’s. They were popular throughout the UK and Europe, but never quite got the attention they deserved elsewhere. Part of another wave of Brit-pop around the same time as Blur and Oasis, Supergrass, led by singer/guitarist/songwriter Gaz Coombes, they combined the energy of post-punk alternative, but…
Based upon Gustave Flaubert’s literary classic and not to be confused with the recently released Gemma Bovery, this is the story of a young married woman desperate to escape the dullness of her provincial life. Madame Bovary is a straight drama, while Gemma Bovery was a comedic dramatic romantic reimagining, which drew inspiration from a…
Director Robert Eggers certainly loves a descent into madness. After the refined horror-thriller The Witch, he’s back with another hallucinatory drama in The Lighthouse. Despite having only two characters on screen for much of the time, this is a complex, disturbing examination of human frailty; sprinkled liberally with a variety of myths from different cultures….
Paul Auster is one of the great American novelists. His previous novel 4321 (2017) was a magnum opus that traced four alternative lives of its main character. But it was a bit of an outlier compared to his many much shorter novels, such as Leviathan and Mr Veritgo, that deeply investigated the lives of their…
My Old School is a quirky and unusual documentary constructed from a mix of archival footage, interviews and animation. In 1993 17-year-old Brandon Lee enrolled as a student at Bearsden Academy in Glasgow. He was a popular student even though his appearance was a bit odd. He claimed that his unusual looks were due to…
From relatively humble beginnings in 1956, when only seven nations competed, the Eurovision Song Contest has grown into a juggernaut of entertainment. There’s a great sense of anticipation before each year’s fresh competition, as TV audiences burgeon. Some 160 million people from more than 150 countries were involved in voting for their favourite artist this…
In 2000, a film with a modest budget and a cast of up-and-coming young actors began production of a franchise that would last 15 years. Inspired in part by a Vibe magazine article on street-racing clubs, the action-thriller chronicled the exploits of a crew deep in the underground racing scene of East Los Angeles. They…
Just in time for the school holidays, Cinderella has arrived, beautifully presented by Queensland Ballet as part of their My First Ballet series. A charming, all-ages adaptation by Matthew Lawrence, Cinderella was first performed in Brisbane in 2013 and has been adapted with permission by Ben Stevenson OBE. As one of the world’s most beloved…
