Chaos and trauma are at play in Every Lovely Terrible Thing. A highly dysfunctional family implodes and picks apart its innards. They are the Colemans who live a rundown weatherboard house on the outskirts of a country town. Cooper, the unemployed, gay, clothing designer grandson in his early 20s, likes dressing in women’s attire and flouncing about. He…
Consent is at the core of the coming-of-age drama How to Have Sex. Frankly, this is a film that needs to be seen by teenagers and their parents and grandparents. Everything seems to be going as it does when youngsters let their hair down, until a line is crossed. After that, there’s no coming back….
A Premiership at what cost? Indeed, is snaring the feted trophy the be all and end all? The Cutting Cove Football Club, located in a small coastal town, has never won a flag, but it hired a coach known as The General (Syd Brisbane) who has. He took on the job three years ago and maintained that…
We are in Poland in 1870. Yentl (Amy Hack) is driven by her desire to study … to learn and understand. Her father teaches at the local Yeshiva (a traditional Jewish educational institution focused on the study of Rabbinic literature). Being a girl, she is not allowed to attend the Yeshiva, nor to study the Torah (the…
The second installment in Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s epic 1965 sci-fi novel picks up where Dune (2021) left off. In this chapter, the exiled Duke of House Atreides, Paul (Timothy Chalamet) establishes himself as a leader. You may remember that in Part One, basically the whole House Atreides was massacred by the evil…
With ‘gaslighting’ being the word of the year in 2022 and mentioned across social media and in real life countless times, it won’t be a surprise to contemporary audiences what the essence of this play is about. It’s interesting to note that Patrick Hamilton wrote the original back in 1938 when its revelations about a…
Racism comes in many forms and from many quarters and can strike with the speed of a bullet train. That subject is explored in a dramatic and humorous way through a series of anecdotes from the coloured English daughter of West Indian parents. Her mother is an actress and her father a mathematician, who migrated to Australia….
Sometimes we get two films released around the same time with the same basic concept (eg: Deep Impact and Armageddon both films concerning a giant meteor headed for Earth; or Dante’s Peak and Volcano, both dealing with destructive volcanic eruptions). Another case in point is the new horror film Baghead. A quick skim of the…
Birds chirp on a summer’s day. Families enjoy a picnic by a stream. A woman tends to beautiful flowers in her garden… Welcome to the most disturbing film of the year. British filmmaker Jonathan Glazer (probably best known for Under the Skin starring Scarlett Johansson) goes where few have dared to tread in The Zone…
Set in rural Victoria, The Rooster marks a highly imaginative and impactful feature film debut for writer and director Mark Leonard Winter. The double Helpmann Award-winning actor, who featured in Elvis, Balibo and The Dressmaker, drew on personal experience to create something special. The film deals with masculinity, isolation and crisis; and features an introverted…
