A young employee, Eli (Oliver Tapp), is sacked from his sales job for his intimidatory social media posts outside work to ex-girlfriend Carina. She subsequently reported him to his employer. He is angry and aggrieved and seeks her out for an explanation, but she keeps blocking him. Short of rent money and in a dark…
Memory. The tricks of memory. I have recollections of what I believe to be ‘turning points’/’defining moments’ in my life and each time I replay them, either, mentally or verbally, both in speech and writing, they subtly change – more or less. If that ‘point’/’moment’ was between two of us, or more, each of us…
Set between Australia and the Philippines, the tragicomedy MR BIG aka Tatay, A Transwoman and That Tiring Tune! deals with pain and regret. Diana (Dax Carnay-Hanrahan) is a trans Filipina woman who now lives in Australia and is engaged to be married to the love of her life, Jerry (Aiden Gale Miranda). At the same…
Mystery Road has graced both the big and small screens. The first two versions were critically received films (Mystery Road and Goldstone) and the third was the first season of the ABC TV adaptation in 2018. The events of Mystery Road S1 slotted in between the timeline of the two movies. All versions star the…
What if the cartoon world turned into real life? Well, that’s what happens in Carlos Saldanha’s family-friendly fantasy Harold and the Purple Crayon. Harold (Zachary Levi) is the manifestation of the vivid imagination of writer Crockett Johnson. He’s a character in a book, who along with his buddies, Moose (Lil Rel Howery) and Porcupine (Tanya…
A brilliant, intricate script, outstanding direction and superb acting by an A-list cast are the hallmarks of The Gentlemen, one of the year’s best films (I know it comes out on 1st January, 2020, but I reckon I am allowed one day’s leeway). It takes concentration to follow the web of deception woven, but the…
It is such a cliché, but trust the magnificent wordsmith in Joanna Murray-Smith to give it so much edge and polish. I speak of an older man leaving his long-term wife for a younger woman. In this case, it is a feted journalist married to a writer – a poet, no less. She gave up…
David Lowery is a hard director to pin down. His versatility means he’s equally at home in a bleak crime drama (Ain’t Them Bodies Saints), a supernatural love story (A Ghost Story) or a family-friendly adventure (Pete’s Dragon). Now he brings us The Old Man and the Gun, a kind of family-friendly crime drama and…
A tough and resolute, factually-based crime drama, The Infiltrator is centred on the actions of the drug cartels that infiltrated the US in the 1980s. The film, directed by Brad Furman and written by Ellen Brown Furman, comes from an autobiography of the same name by Robert Mazur. Mazur (played by Bryan Cranston), a US…
Betrayal, by Harold Pinter was written in 1978, and belongs to his great middle period, and along with other works like No Man’s Land (1975) and Old Times, is often characterised as one of his ‘memory plays’. Pinter was given the Nobel prize for Literature in 2005. This play uses reverse chronology, and so the…
