A pleasantly distracting comedy, Rosa’s Wedding centres around a hard-working woman who’s selfless to the point of exhaustion. She looks after everyone – family and friends all – other than herself. About to turn 45, Rosa (Candela Peña) works long hours as a seamstress in the wardrobe department of a film production company in Valencia….
This is a dark and erotic fairy tale with a dominatrix queen and an innocent but feisty teen Snow White who is experiencing her first glimpses of sexual awareness. It is a heady mix that kept me engrossed for the close to two hours of non-stop dance. The plot follows the fairy tale closely. Queen…
Disney enlists Lin-Manuel Miranda for Encanto, an animated family adventure that comes off a bit like In the Heights transplanted to rural Colombia. While this is a film filled with colour and energy, its rather muddled plot and lashings of treacle diminished its impact for me. Jared Bush, Byron Howard and Charise Castro Smith share…
Honour is at stake in Verdi’s powerful opera Ernani, which features a surfeit of rich, rounded and redolent performances. The music is superb, rousing from the magnificent opening chorus number (with many more to follow), not to overlook a series of emotional arias. The first half, in particular, I found strikingly impactful. The action takes place…
Much like Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Australian director Claire McCarthy’s Ophelia concentrates on a relatively minor character in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. But unlike Stoppard’s absurdist play, this film is basically a re-telling of Hamlet from Ophelia’s perspective – with a few twists thrown in. McCarthy directs from Semi Chellas’ screenplay, adapting Lisa Klein’s…
Are you an adventurous moviegoer? Did you go to Everything, Everywhere, All at Once and think, “yeah, but it could be a bit weirder”? If so, my friend, then you need to seek out Biosphere; Mel Eslyn’s quirky but provocative film about the end of the world (or is it?). As the title suggests, Biosphere…
As local films like Storm Boy, Babe, Happy Feet and Red Dog have shown, the formula for making a successful family friendly film seems pretty simple. All you need is a cute, mischievous animal – preferably a dog – after all, dogs have been the main character in some great films over the years, from…
What a lot of fun I had watching The Longest Minute. It had a terrific script, was filled with an array of great characters, had a brilliantly human storyline, and moved as fast as a winger with a try scoring intercept. And it all revolves around the 2015 NRL Grand Final and a Townsville family…
I think in today’s vast music scene, cover records are merely blown off as a novelty or simply overlooked. Even for established artists, a cover record is typically assumed to just be a money grab. Hopefully, this electrifying Johnny Cash cover record from soul singer Brian Owens will change that mindset for this go around….
Three years ago we were introduced to Drac and the gang in Hotel Transylvania, a fun filled animated comedy about vampires, monsters and freaks. It was a story about a father and daughter, but as director Genndy Tartakovsky put it, it was just that the father happened to have been Dracula. The filmmakers did a terrific…
