It’s been fifty years since the horror classic The Exorcist hit screens and scared the bejesus out of audiences. Since then there have been many other films that have delved into the demonic possession genre. The Pope’s Exorcist is the latest in a long line of such films and it ticks off all the usual…
Having closely watched all 75 minutes of Pear-Shaped, I remain utterly confused about what I just saw. It is a semi-autobiographical work (it contains both real and imagined experiences), written by Miranda Middleton and Ziggy Resnick, starring the latter and Luisa Scrofani. It concerns an eating disorder overlaid with Alice in Wonderland. What the? From what I…
Rolling Thunder Vietnam is a deeply emotional, richly rewarding musical and narrative experience that takes you to the heart of the highly divisive Vietnam War. Featuring 20 of the most affecting songs of the era, Rolling Thunder Vietnam prizes open the hopes and fears of the young soldiers who went into battle. It also looks at the…
Basketball is huge in America; and Air Jordan shoes are now synonymous with it. Of course, that wasn’t always the case. Director and actor Ben Affleck’s (Argo) new film AIR tells the story of how the greatest basketball player of all time, the shoe and the Nike company came together. So this is one of…
Brilliantly performed by Justine Clarke who, as the 27th Australian Prime Minister, displays determination, indignance and frustration, I would suggest one’s political predilection will have a fair say in how Joanna Murray-Smith’s words go down. As the writer, the latter has combined fact and fiction. She has taken incendiary language from shock jocks, political opponents and…
We’re among African Americans in a working-class suburb in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in the 1950s. Although affable when it suits him, Troy Maxon (Bert Labonte) can be a hard man to stomach. A garbage collector, he has a “my way or the highway approach” and sometimes the choices he makes are decidedly ordinary. His upbringing was far from desirable….
Hirokazu Kore-eda is one of Japan’s greatest living filmmakers. You could mount a case he’s the greatest living Japanese filmmaker if you exclude animation (and thus, Hayao Miyazaki). In 2013, he took home the Special Jury Prize from the same event for Like Father, Like Son. In 2018, he won the Palme d’Or at Cannes…
Movies based on video games are pretty common – Angry Birds, Sonic the Hedgehog and Pokemon: Detective Pikachu to name a few. But movies based on board games seems counter-intuitive. I mean, the board doesn’t move, and much of the play is inside the players’ heads. So the arrival of Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among…
Based on a memoir by the late Timothy Conigrave, playwright Tommy Murphy has given us an up close and personal look at a 15-year gay relationship. It starts in the teen years and works its way through to the HIV/AIDS crisis of the ‘80s and ‘90s. Tim (Declan Clifford) has his eyes on the school football…
Keanu Reeves returns as the taciturn, virtually indestructible lone-wolf assassin John Wick. This is the fourth installment in the successful franchise that has continually raised the bar in terms of staging kinetic action sequences. The 2014 original boasted some of the best stunt choreography and kinetic action sequences from a Hollywood movie. And John Wick:…
