Director Eric Lavaine reunites most of the cast of his 2014 ensemble comedy Barbecue and brings them back to reprise their characters for this sequel, which was one of the hits of the recent French Film Festival. Happy 50 is also known as Plancha (“griddle”) in its original French. Eight years after the events of…
A new Australian work, The Critical Marriage by Mark Andrew is the inside story of a relationship between a couple of intellectual heavyweights. The wife and narrator, Imogen, is an economist. She first set eyes upon her German husband Bernhard, an evolutionary psychologist, in an Oxford University lecture theatre. The sparks flew instantly and wedded bliss followed soon…
In a case of being in the wrong place at the right time, alternative rock power trio Dinosaur Jr. had their best-selling, major label releases in the first half of the 90’s, which got them lumped in with the grunge bands of the Pacific Northwest like Nirvana and Pearl Jam. Of course, they originated on…
Turning a cartoon into a live action comedy adventure seems to have done the trick a couple of years ago, so a sequel was always on the cards. As a matter of fact, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows received the green light the night the first film opened. The producers chose 32-year-old…
Clever, zany and funny, Happy Death Day 2U ticks all the boxes for a sequel. I loved the creativity in the original and feared that any follow-up would be a disappointment. Fortunately though that’s not the case because the writer and director Christopher Landon has taken the finest elements of the initial offering and twisted…
Dinuka McKenzie’s police detective Kate Miles is back for the third time in Tipping Point, and once again her family and community connections are central to the story. Miles was introduced in McKenzie’s award winning debut The Torrent and returned in Taken. This third book in the series could be the last if for no…
Fortunately, Alexander Skarsgård isn’t by nature a voiceless person. It would have been a strange sight in The Legend of Tarzan. In Mute he’s such a person; with no sound leaving his mouth. And that because of a painful confrontation with the propeller of a motorboat (I suppose). What remains is a guy with the…
Tasmanian-born Errol Flynn was one of the biggest stars in Hollywood in the 1930s and 40s, and the swashbuckling star of action films like Captain Blood and The Adventures of Robin Hood dominated the box office. The charismatic and handsome movie icon also had a reputation as a hard-drinking cavalier womaniser and a hell-raiser off-screen….
Chris Hemsworth throws off Thor’s cape to become a different kind of super-hero (or perhaps anti-hero) in Extraction. This by-the-numbers actioner is about a straightforward as you can get. But Sam Hargrave’s kinetic direction and a script from Hemsworth’s old pals, the Russo brothers, propel it along at breakneck speed. So what it lacks in…
On John Marsden, by Alice Pung is the second book in Black Inc.’s Writers on Writers series, published in association with La Trobe University Press. In the series, prominent writers share their intimate reflections on the work of Australian authors who have inspired them. In doing so, they begin new conversations about writing and culture,…
