Winner of five Goya Awards (the Spanish equivalent of the Oscars), Truman is a bittersweet comedy/drama, which screened during the recent Spanish Film Festival earlier in the year. It was one of the more popular films in the festival and now it gets a cinema release. This amusing and deeply affecting film deals with universal…
Louisiana 1913. Three young boys are enjoying their summer playing outside near the edge of the forest as their wealthy parents Henry and Mary entertain guests at the family lake house. Next, the unthinkable happens. The Davenports are well known and respected in Opelousas and the disappearance of their youngest child galvanizes the small community…
The Van Apfel Girls are Gone by Felicity McLean hooked me in with its all-too-familiar north-west of Sydney 1990s setting and the missing girls premise reminiscent of Joan Lindsay’s classic Picnic at Hanging Rock. Here’s the blurb: Tikka Molloy was eleven and one-sixth years old during the long hot summer of 1992 – the summer…
The truth, they say, can be stranger than fiction. In Lydia Dean Pilcher’s A Call to Spy, the true story of remarkable women spies might not be all that strange, but it is powerful. Virginia Hall is sometimes touted as America’s first woman spy. While the title might not be entirely accurate, she was one…
Men behaving badly towards women and the consequences of excessive drinking are themes running through The Royal Hotel. Director and co-writer (alongside Oscar Redding) Kitty Green first saw the documentary Hotel Coolgardie as an Australian film festival jury member. That 2017 doco was her inspiration. She was taken by the story of two young Scandinavian…
In JJ Winlove’s debut feature, June Again, a go-getting woman is gone. In her place is an empty shell. June Wilton (Noni Hazlehurst) has vascular dementia. She’s being well looked after in an appropriate facility, where the staff is kind and understanding. Her condition means she has visions of the past as if they were…
Australian journalist Paul Daley takes on his country’s past in his new novel Jesustown. Set mainly in a remote Aboriginal community in Australia’s far north, Jesustown attempts to tackle not only Australia’s history but the way in which we remember and record history. Patrick Renmark is in disgrace. The reasons for this become slowly apparent…
Patrick is a British comedy celebrating our love of pets. It’s told through the eyes of a young woman whose life changes when she unexpectedly inherits her grandmother’s pampered pug. That woman is Sarah Francis (Beattie Edmonson). Her partner has just called it quits on their relationship. She’s about to start a new teaching job…
Rubika Shah’s documentary feature White Riot re-tells the inspired story of Rock Against Racism. RAR was a grassroots movement that stymied the rise of racism in 1970s Britain by galvanising youth through politically charged music. The film contextualises a growing white supremacist sentiment born from the Nazi Party, but manifesting in numerous cultural and political…
Call me a muggle but I was left cold by Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, the bloated third instalment in the Fantastic Beasts series created by Harry Potter author J K Rowling as part of the extended Potterverse. The series serves as a kind of prequel to the Harry Potter series, and explores the…
