Writer and director Paul Thomas Anderson’s rigorous commitment to excellence in filmmaking (Magnolia) pays off again big time in One Battle After Another. Featuring stellar performances from Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro and others, it is an epic, darkly comedic, dramatic, action thriller. As Pat Calhoun, DiCaprio is in a frenzied relationship with…
Scottish author Graeme Macrae Burnet loves playing meta-textual games. And that’s patently evident in his trilogy of crime novels featuring French police detective Geroges Gorski, of which A Case of Matricide is the third and last. The books are purportedly written over forty years ago by a little known French author Raymond Brunet and merely…
Jo Nesbo’s 2020 book The Kingdom was a violent story centred around anti-hero Roy Opgard and the criminal machinations of Roy and his brother Carl in the small Norwegian town of Os. That book was marketed as a stand-alone crime thriller. And to some extent the story was wrapped up, tragically as expected, by the…
Greedy People is a blackly comic and atmospheric low budget crime-drama from director Potsy Ponciroli (Old Henry) and writer Mike Vukadinovich (TV series Runaways). Set in a picturesque coastal town in Rhode Island, it very much has a similar vibe to the Coen brothers. Ponciroli juggles a great cast of eccentric and amoral characters, all…
Michael Keaton both stars in and directs this slow-burn crime drama about a contract hitman suffering from rapidly developing dementia. This marks Keaton’s second effort behind the camera, following 2007’s little-seen The Merry Gentlemen, a dark drama about another hitman undergoing a crisis. There are a number of superficial similarities between that film and this…
Multi-award winning Australian crime writer Candice Fox returns her fiction to Australia for the first time in a few years with the high octane thriller High Wire. High Wire is a little bit Jack Reacher and a little bit Mad Max but all Fox who once again takes some familiar tropes and twists, embellishes them…
The boys are back! Sure, the (nearly) 61 year-old Brad Pitt and the 63 year-old George Clooney hardly qualify as “boys” anymore, but their reunion in Jon Watts’ crime-caper Wolfs is still welcome. Their easy charm and almost telepathic on-screen chemistry elevate this amiable romp. I’m going out on a limb and suggest Watts (Spider-Man:…
Australia has doesn’t seem to have had the plethora of famous serial killers that America has. As a result, few characters loom larger in the Australian consciousness than Ivan Milat – the so-called ‘Backpacker Murderer’. Milat’s crimes were uncovered when bodies were found in the Belanglo State Forest a few hours south of Sydney. In…
Shadow City is Natalie Conyer’s follow up to her award winning debut Present Tense. Present Tense was set in South Africa and focussed on South African issues. In Shadow City, Conyer brings her Cape Town police detective Schalk Laurens to Sydney in search of a missing girl, allowing her to dig into more global concerns….
Science fiction author Cory Doctorow has taken a stand against big corporations, in particular the use of Digital Media Rights to lock people into particular companies. So much so that the audio version of his new book, The Bezzle and the previous book in this series, are being offered through Kickstarter rather than through Audible…
