Brace yourself, the inevitable comparisons are coming! A good-looking group of ten young people awake on a beach, make-up intact, attractively dressed, with no knowledge of how it was that they got there. Or even who they are. Clues are scattered about in the sand near them, and its not too long at all before…
A multi-faceted fight for justice, which tugs at the heartstrings, is the essence of the dramatic musical Ragtime. The timeframe is the early 20th century and the piece combines fictitious representative characters with historical figures such as Harry Houdini, J.P. Morgan and Henry Ford. It is a story of immigrants and African Americans facing adversary…
I lost track of the Terminator franchise long ago. I think it was after Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003). And since that film logically tied off the loose ends, I was comfortable with it finishing there. But then we had the weak and divergent Terminator Salvation (2009) and Terminator Genisys (2015). I’d stopped…
Balloon tells the true story of two East German families’ escape to the West a decade before the Wall was torn down. It’s a tense and dramatic film, with moments of melodrama. We’re in the summer of 1979. The Strelzyks and Wetzels have been working on an audacious plan for more than two years. They…
Yeah. Once again a movie about time traveling. Always interesting to see how they incorporated the paradox of time travel. And there’s always going to be someone who claims something isn’t right. Not that I really care about that because I still don’t know anyone who has actually traveled through time to provide proof whether…
American remakes of European movies perhaps don’t have the best track record. But Bart Freundlich’s After the Wedding – a re-working of Susanne Bier’s 2006 Danish film of the same title* – mostly succeeds thanks to some clever writing, sharp direction and fine acting. The action is transplanted from Copenhagen to New York; but the…
We’ve all heard the adage “family first”, but this is ridiculous! Every time a person marries into this wealthy and secretive family … at midnight they have to play a game. That is a time-honoured tradition that can’t be broken. You see, this clan made its money off the back of board games. The new…
As a filmmaking culture, Australia has a lot of people with great ideas. But small budgets and stingy government funding mean sometimes those ideas aren’t fully realised. And sadly, Promised is one of those. Writer-director Nick Condi’s somewhat unconventional family drama is apparently based on a true story, but its heart gets lost in a…
Questions of morality and decency are at the heart of an outstanding comedic drama concerning the interactions of two night security guards and two police officers in New York. Jeff (Charles Grounds) was booted out of the navy after three years for dope smoking, something his father – who was a naval hero – was…
Just as it depicts Judy Garland’s life Judy, the movie, is a train wreck. In fact, I couldn’t wait for it to end. Garland wasn’t allowed to be a regular kid and was lauded over by the studio head Louis B. Mayer and her obnoxious, overbearing mother, Ethel. Given pill after pill at an early…
