When Australian filmmaker Robert Connolly directs a feature film, audiences pay attention. His latest is The Dry, and this thriller doesn’t disappoint. Based on Jane Harper’s novel of the same title, The Dry powerfully depicts a community in crisis. Connolly’s previous feature, Paper Planes (2014) proved a surprise hit, and there’s no reason The Dry…
The ancient and modern worlds collide in the special effects action blockbuster Monster Hunter. Based on a video game series of the same name, the plot – such that it is – is basically inconsequential. It’s merely an excuse for non-stop fighting and a legion of monsters to test and retest the limits of human…
– High Ground – Only in cinemas from 28 January 2021 We have 5 double in-season passes thanks to Madman Films. *(Tickets valid in Australia only)* Watch the trailer HERE Set against the stunning landscapes of 1930s Arnhem Land, HIGH GROUND chronicles young Aboriginal man Gutjuk, who in a bid to save the last of…
The truth, they say, can be stranger than fiction. In Lydia Dean Pilcher’s A Call to Spy, the true story of remarkable women spies might not be all that strange, but it is powerful. Virginia Hall is sometimes touted as America’s first woman spy. While the title might not be entirely accurate, she was one…
A gay Sliding Doors with subtitles? End of the Century is essentially a two-handed drama which serves up a meditation on relationships, the choices we make, and the fallibility of memory. Ocho (Juan Barberini), a fortysomething Argentine poet from New York on holiday in Barcelona, meets Javi (Ramon Pujol), a Berlin-based producer of a children’s…
The Nightingale (2018) rewrote the rules around brutal representations of Australia’s colonial past. Now The Furnace follows in its footsteps, albeit less successfully. In remote Western Australia circa 1897, a young Afghani cameleer, Hanif (Ahmed Malek), is determined to escape the outback and return home. Hanif has witnessed a white man murder his mentor. Now…
In the Name of the Land is the first feature fiction film for Edouard Bergeon, a former photojournalist and documentarian. It has been largely inspired by the life of his own father, a farmer who passed away in 1996, and to whom the film is fittingly dedicated. This is a grim – often bleak –…
Words on Bathroom Walls is an important movie. This mainstream dramatic teen romance normalises schizophrenia. While it’s often disturbing, it has an authenticity about it. That has much to do with the balance in the script by Nick Naveda – based on a novel of the same name by Julia Walton – and the calibre…
A low-rent Australian drama in which very little happens, How Do You Know Chris? is strictly film festival fare. It is the year 2000. Nineteen year-old (nearly 20) Emi Mustafi (Tatiana Quaresma) meets Chris (Luke Cook), 28, in a laundromat. Even though they’ve just met, the older copywriter invites the commerce student to a small…
In 2016 A Street Cat Named Bob introduced audiences to a stray ginger cat (Bob) who helped a recovering drug addict turn his life around. That movie was based on an international best seller co-written by the man whose story it told, James Bowen. It was a charmer. Now Luke Treadaway returns as Bowen in…
