At the risk of offending true believers, this is a church movie. It pivots around forgiveness. To the best of my knowledge, it was largely, if not entirely, funded from church resources. I dare say its key audience will be those of the faith, and ex-pat New Zealanders (it was made there, and is set…
Imagine if we lived in but one version of the world and there were other incarnations. What would be the benefits and the dangers? That mind-bending contention is at the heart of the low budget Australian sci-fi drama, The Gateway. Physicist and researcher Jane Chandler (Jacqueline McKenzie) is happily married to writer, Matt (Myles Pollard)….
Breath is a haunting and elegiac coming-of-age tale. Set on the wind-swept coast of Western Australia in the 70s, it centres on two 14-year old surf rats. Bruce Pike – aka Pikelet – (Samuel Coulter) and Ivan Loon – aka Loonie – (Ben Spence) are best friends. Pike is a good boy from a respectable…
Planet Earth II Live in Concert offers windows to the world like you’ve never seen before. It’s all on a giant screen, with spectacular musical accompaniment. The vision is drawn from the Emmy and BAFTA award-winning Sir David Attenborough series that was aired in Australia last year and took four years to make. The music…
The unique talent that was Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunipingu is showcased in this reverential documentary written and directed by Paul Williams. Gurrumul is known as a band member of Yothu Yindi; and a supreme artist in his own right. He spoke little, but said so much through his evocative music. More often than not he let…
then Loveless is a slow moving, atmospheric Russian drama that features harsh characters. It won of the Jury Prize at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for a Best Foreign Language Oscar. Zhenya (Maryana Spivak) and Boris (Aleksey Rozin) have a deep disdain for one another; and for their 12 year-old son, Alyosha…
The excitement I felt while watching One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) – a pivotal movie in my formative years – came flooding back while watching Unsane. A smart young woman seeks help after a stalker has made her life miserable for two years. But she’s inadvertently admitted to a private psychiatric hospital. The…
Superheroes? Check. Evil villains? Check. Massive battles? Check. Funny jokes? Check. Must be another Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) movie, right? Well, Avengers: Infinity War is certainly that. But this latest from Anthony and Joe Russo – who brought us the Captain America installments Winter Soldier and Civil War – is more filler than killer. Avengers:…
Boyhood was a very good film, but it was bloated. Last Flag Flying, by the same director, Richard Linklater, isn’t as good. Like Boyhood, it’s also distended, but still has its moments. Three buddies who served in Vietnam together reunite after decades for one express purpose. In 2003, soft-spoken family man Larry “Doc” Shepherd (Steve…
The title is quite a mouthful, but The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is a delightful British crowd-pleaser that combines the impact of war with true love. Based on the bestselling novel of the same name, the film tells the story of Juliet Ashton (Lily James), a free-spirited, successful writer living in post-WWII…
