Gritty and unrelenting, Wind River marks the directorial debut of Taylor Sheridan. He’s the screenwriter behind Sicario and Hell or High Water; and here he weaves a tense thriller. Wind River is Sheridan’s conclusion to a thematic trilogy (with those earlier films) exploring the modern American frontier. The film explores what Sheridan calls “perhaps the most tangible remnant…
British director Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead) was raised on a diet of Hollywood genre films, but his quirky sensibility and sense of humour subverts the usual tropes of the genre. His Hot Fuzz was a loving homage to those American crime films he enjoyed watching. A decade on he returns to the crime…
The most problematic of the Marvel superheroes is given a reboot in Spider-Man: Homecoming. When I say problematic, I mean because of his movie history more than anything else. In just the past 15 years, there have been no less than six movies featuring the teenage web-slinger. Sam Raimi’s 2002 – 07 trilogy starring Tobey…
One of the truisms of gambling says the house always wins. However, with The House – a supposed comedy about an ordinary family that set up an illegal underground casino in the leafy streets of suburbia – it’s the audience who are the losers. Let’s face it – when was the last time Will Ferrell made…
A low-rent noir thriller with some questionable acting, Detour nevertheless keeps the twists coming. The film focuses on Harper (Tye Sheridan – X-Men: Apocalypse), a tense, privileged young law student. The young man suspects his stepdad, Vincent (Stephen Moyer) caused a car accident, leaving Harper’s mother in a coma. Harper is livid that Vincent has barely visited his…
A pall of foreboding hangs over almost every scene in the harrowing thriller Hounds of Love. That foreboding turns to dread and then white-knuckle fear. The film marks an auspicious feature debut from writer/director Ben Young. Hounds of Love is set in Perth during the summer of 1987. Teenage girls are disappearing from the streets. They…
Ben Affleck isn’t exactly one of my favorite actors. Not that he’s such a terrible actor, but he’s such a smooth guy who manages to play in some outstanding movies every time. Movies that didn’t leave an everlasting impression on me anyway. In retrospect, it’s really a giant list I’ve seen him in, such as…
We’ve seen a number of films recently about elderly people behaving badly and refusing to go gently into that good night, although the nadir of this sub-genre would have to be last year’s awful Dirty Grandpa. We even had the British comedy Golden Years, in which an elderly couple, fed up with the way their…
I quite enjoy a good crime read, so when author Sandi Wallace approached me to review her debut novel, Tell Me Why, I found myself agreeing despite a heavy review shelf. What attracted me initially was the setting – this book is set in rural/small-town Victoria, a place I’m familiar with. Tell Me Why is the first…
Jerico Stewart (Kevin Costner) is a danger to society. He’s locked up in a maximum-security prison as a chained wild beast. An unruly person without feelings. A psychopathic person who doesn’t even know the difference between right and wrong (“You can’t punish someone who doesn’t know he did something wrong“). And this thanks to his…
