Vince Vaughn in a crime movie where he plays a rough-looking drug dealer? You gotta be kidding me. Although he surprised me with an excellent part in Hacksaw Ridge, I always associate him with feel-good, romantic crap movies with the kind of humor I never laugh about in most cases. Well, I was totally wrong…
Three friends – drag queens Mitzi and Felicia, and trans performer Bernadette – board a battered old bus named “Priscilla”. They plan to travel from Sydney across the desert to fulfill a performance engagement in Alice Springs. Mitzi’s past has come back to provide an unlikely second chance. Along the way to the Alice, the “girls” frock…
Listening to the latest from Icelandic chanteuse Björk, can feel like stepping through the curtain to enter an audio/visual piece at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. At first it can feel jarring, disorienting as the music pulses with what may seem at times like several different pieces of electronic music at once, and…
Sweet Country is the sophomore feature film from indigenous filmmaker Warwick Thornton, best known for his award-winning 2009 drama Samson and Delilah. Although this is only his second feature film, he’s been busy with short films, television projects and documentaries like We Don’t Need A Map, which premiered at the Sydney International Film Festival in…
Before it was a The Rocky Horror Picture Show of 1975, Rocky Horror Show was already a cult classic. It was at once a humorous tribute to science fiction and B grade horror movies and a culturally iconic examination of empowerment and fluid-sexuality. The adults-only musical written by Richard O’Brien tells the story of conservative newly-engaged…
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…
