Brian Kirk’s 21 Bridges is a predictable procedural broken into two parts – one involving a big haul of drugs and cop killers, and the other corrupt police. The script by Adam Mervis and Matthew Michael Carnahan (World War Z) is nothing we haven’t seen many times before. The only interest is how it reaches…
State-sanctioned lies underpin the political thriller Official Secrets. The lies cost as many as a million lives. The US and the UK were looking to justify starting a war in Iraq; with or without the backing of the UN (which wasn’t forthcoming). They do so on the pretense that the Iraqis have weapons of mass…
Calling into a streetside deli on the way home from his hospital shift, Doctor Harrison Brennan becomes an innocent victim in yet another convenience store hold up. Shot by responding Chicago police as he attempts to help the cashier with his injuries, Brennan leaves behind a husband and an adopted seventeen year old daughter. The…
As they say, only lawyers benefit from divorce proceedings. That rings true in Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story. Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) and Charlie (Adam Driver) have been married for a decade. They live and work in New York. She’s an actress originally from Los Angeles. She met Charlie when she travelled to New York as a…
A compelling and dramatic storyline and evocative score are matched by a series of stellar performances in MTC’s musical Kiss of the Spider Woman. The plot concerns the extraction of information through brutalisation and humiliation of prisoners held in an Argentine jail. More specifically, it involves the relationship between window dresser Molina (Ainsley Melham) and…
Love. Oil. Economic freedom. We come full circle from when oil was first discovered until it runs out in this drama with dystopian elements, appropriately named Oil. We move through five-time frames, from Cornwall in 1889 and Tehran in 1908 to Hampstead in 1970 in the first act, then Baghdad in 2021 and back to…
First up, an admission. Despite its fine pedigree, I was quietly dreading the prospect of seeing Ford v Ferrari. I figured the movie would be a drawn out against-the-odds motor racing story. But I need not have worried because it turned out to be pretty darn good, although I felt it was a tad long….
A man writes a 17,000 page report. Sound good? Maybe that potted summary doesn’t really sell it; but Scott Z. Burns’ docu-fiction about US torture during the euphemistically-named “war on terror” is a fascinating if slow-moving lesson on the dangers of unbounded power. Burns is possibly better-known as a writer, particularly for his collaborations with…
In the tradition of Mafia movies like The Godfather (1972) and Goodfellas (1990) comes The Irishman. This tale is set around the fortunes of one man rising through the ranks of the organisation. And while the action centres on him, much of the plot concerns the fate of powerful Teamsters’ union boss Jimmy Hoffa. World…
In Emu Runner, nine-year old Gemma (played by newcomer Rhae-Kye Waites) is a Ngemba aboriginal girl growing up in the NSW town of Brewarrina, some 800 kms north of Sydney. She is devastated when her mother dies during a fishing expedition to the local river. Gemma’s father Jay Jay (Wayne Blair, a filmmaker in his…
