The supremely talented Washington family come together to keep the legacy of the late August Wilson alive with The Piano Lesson. And in the process, they’ve created one of the most extraordinary films of the year. The Piano Lesson is the third in patriarch Denzel Washington’s ambitious ongoing project to produce films of all Wilson’s…
I must confess that I haven’t seen the first two films in the Terrifier series. But I was drawn to check out the third film in the slasher franchise out of curiosity due to news reports from the US about people fainting, vomiting and fleeing from the cinema due to the intense level of graphic…
In 2002, the tense thriller Phone Booth (2002) was centred around, you guessed it, a phone booth. Now, 22 years later, Robert Zemeckis’ new drama Here is centred around a lounge room. It’s about the people who lived and roamed in that space dating back to the formation of Earth. It features a volcanic eruption,…
Just how far can artificial intelligence take us? Can it deliver genuine companionship and more for the lonely, elderly and ailing? Those questions are answered in the resounding affirmative by playwright Jose Rivera in his dramatic and comedic work Your Name Means Dream. Aislin (Caroline Lee), of Polish Irish extraction (and whose name means dream…
A whip smart dramatic and comedic script and a couple of stellar performances characterise a seedy story set in Singapore. Singaporean Chinese Girl (Merlynn Tong) is 14 and her brother Boy (Charles Wu) is 21. Boy moved out of home seven years ago and became a gang member, which he regards as a badge of…
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…
Body image is a hot topic at the moment, something The Substance recently tapped into with great success. But while The Substance leaned more into a particular kind of body horror, Aaron Schimberg goes in a different direction with his intriguing but perplexing A Different Man. In the film, the main character has neurofibromatosis. Basically…
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…
Taciturn American Lee Miller (Kate Winslet) is about to be interviewed in her London home. She questions why she should allow the interview to take place and then agrees on the condition that she can ask the interviewer some hard questions of her own. That (apparently) is Lee Miller to a tee – unapologetic, surly,…
The harrowing WWII drama From Hilde, With Love is based on the true story of Hilde and Hans Coppi. He was a revolutionary and a communist in Germany when Hitler was in power, learning Morse code to liaise with the Russians. She was a conservative dental assistant who was with another man when he caught…
