Diminutive 88-year old filmmaker Agnes Varda (The Gleaners and I) returns to the screen with the whimsical road-trip documentary Faces Places; her first feature film in nine years. Here she teams up with 33-year old French visual artist and film director who goes by simply JR. He’s known for his large scale photographic murals, and…
Who would have thought that one of the biggest – and tawdriest – sports scandals of the 20th Century could play out as Greek tragedy? But Australian director Craig Gillespie (The Finest Hours) manages that – and a lot more – with I, Tonya. This ingeniously devised film delves into the life of Tonya Harding,…
B.B. King once told an interviewer questioning how long he could continue to record and tour, that “the Blues do not retire.” The King, who died at 89 may have actually kept performing a few years after “The Thrill (Was) Gone,” but at 80 he still had a lot on the ball. And, at 78…
Maze Runner: The Death Cure concludes the generic dystopian saga based on the popular series of novels written by James Dashner. And unlike a couple of other YA adaptations, at least here the producers resisted the temptation to split the final film into two parts. We were first introduced to a group of heroes, known as…
Swinging Safari reunites writer and director Stephan Elliott with key personnel from his The Adventures of Priscilla: Queen of the Desert (1994). They include producer Al Clark, production designer Colin Gibson, costume designer Lizzy Gardiner, editor Sue Blainey and composer Guy Gross. New to the team are hair and makeup designer Rick Findlater and cinematographer Brad Shield. It’s…
One of the world’s most inventive filmmakers produces one of the year’s most inventive films in The Shape of Water. This vivid fantasy from Guillermo del Toro is both a loving homage to cinema and an engrossing tale in its own right. From his first feature, Cronos, del Toro has been fascinated by monsters of one…
Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” (part of the final movement of his Symphony No. 9) is a thorough examination of the emotion of joy as being heavenly in origin and available to mankind through a loving God. In A Clockwork Orange, however, it represents a thematic extension of 15-year-old protagonist Alex’s psychological conditioning. As the vicious…
A moral conundrum and the consequences choice are at the heart of The Commuter. This is the fourth collaboration between director Jaume Collet-Serra and Liam Neeson (after Unknown, Non-Stop and Run All Night). Neeson plays Michael MacCauley, a 60-year-old middle manager at a faceless insurance company. Like so many hard-working family men, he’s at financial breaking point. His son…
The Wizard of Oz is a classic Hollywood film of 1939, based on a book by L. Frank Baum. Everybody must have seen it. I saw it at the cinema (in Bondi Junction) as a child and never got over the Flying Monkeys – they terrified me – and the ‘creepy’ munchkins. Of course, then…
The Glass Castle is the film version of a true story that will baffle you. A film that balances between a romanticised comedy and a serious drama. It’s like an adventurous road-movie in which an apparently normal family travel around as nomads. But “apparently normal” is an understatement, because they lead a rather unusual life….
