Despite the success of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator and Mel Gibson’s visceral The Passion of the Christ, the lavish big budget Biblical epic and sword-and-sandals drama has gone the way of the once popular Western. They have become a moribund genre that holds little appeal or relevance for today’s movie going audiences raised on a diet…
You could call A Hologram for the King a coming-of-age story for a man or a midlife crisis tale. It’s Tom Hanks in less-than-populist filmmaking mode. The film features an unconventional narrative based on a culture clash. In recession-ravaged 2010, American businessman Alan Clay (Hanks), broke, depressed and freshly divorced, arrives in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia…
I am really sorry to have to say that I have just seen another Australian movie which is absolutely ghastly, in the form of Red Billabong. Nick Marshall (Dan Ewing from Home and Away) and his estranged brother Tristan (Tim Pocock) are drawn into a world of secrets and lies when their grandfather’s enormous outback…
This tense, claustrophobic thriller cleverly inverts the premise behind such thrillers as Wait Until Dark and Blind Terror, in which a vulnerable blind woman was terrorised by killers until she fought back. Here though it is a blind person who is doing the terrorising. And it is a surprisingly effective thriller that grips until the…
Greek tragedy done Scottish style, Sunset Song is tortuous to sit through. This is Terence Davies’ (Distant Voices, Still Lives) intimate epic of tragedy and love set at the dawn of the Great War. It is about a young woman’s endurance against the hardships of rural Scottish life, based on a novel by Lewis Grassic…
A sensitive drama with a mystery at its core, the Israeli feature The Kind Words combines humour and pathos. At age 35, Dorona’s (Rotem Zissman-Cohen) life seems to have hit a dead-end. She can’t have children, she’s abandoned attempts at adoption and she seems intent on pushing her loving husband, Ricky, as far away as…
It’s rude, it’s crude, it sets out to push the envelope and succeeds in doing so, but is also quite clever. I’m talking about Sausage Party, an animated feature from the warped minds of Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg and Jonah Hill. The language is full on. From the outset, it is rampantly sexual with the cartoon…
Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the cinema, along comes another shark thriller in the form of The Shallows. Ever since Steven Spielberg gave us the summer blockbuster with Jaws in 1975, great white sharks have been given something of a bad reputation by Hollywood filmmakers. The success of Jaws…
J G Ballard’s prescient dystopian 1975 novel High-Rise was a bleak allegory for the class warfare and decline of civilization and the breakdown of society. Ballard wrote the novel in the 70s during a period of tumultuous upheaval in the social fabric of Britain before the economic downturn and rampant unionism drove Thatcher’s conservatives into…
The best horror films have featured nasty boogeymen who haunt our dreams. In the 80s we had the likes of Michael Myers, Freddie Krueger and Jason Vorhees. More recently we’ve had the apparitions of The Babadook and It Follows to creep us out. Now director David F Sandberg gives us a chilling creation that plays…
