Fans of Midnight Oil – one of Australia’s hardest rocking and most political bands who refused to compromise – will want to check out this informative and revealing documentary. They may not learn anything particularly new here, but they will certainly enjoy the music and the memories from their four-decade career. The Oils were formed…
Based on a true story and set in Denmark in the mid 1700s, The Promised Land reunites star Mads Mikkelsen with director Nikolaj Arcel (who directed him in 2012’s A Royal Affair). Impoverished former soldier Ludvig Kahlen (Mikkelsen) lives on his meagre army pension. But he has a grand dream and sets out to tame…
A Quiet Place: Day One is an origin story. But it could have been named how to avoid a “cat”astrophe – with all the screen time given to a moggy. The film goes back to when the blind but noise-sensitive creatures featured in A Quiet Place (2018) and A Quiet Place Part II (2020) invaded…
For a while now, Glen Powell has largely traded on his (very) good looks. His recent cinema outing Anyone But You, proved a box office hit. But the actor spreads his wings somewhat as an undercover agent in Richard Linklater’s Hit Man. I say “somewhat” because he still can’t entirely escape his genetic gifts in…
A dark family secret explodes in Joachim Lafosse’s disturbing drama A Silence. Astrid Schaar (Emmanuelle Devos) has said nothing about the deeply disquieting matter for 30 years, but a figure from the past triggers massive concern. Astrid’s renowned, media-savvy lawyer husband Francois (Daniel Auteuil) has been fighting an incendiary, high-profile case for five years. He…
The Despicable Me series, created by French filmmaker Pierre Coffin, has developed and expanded over the past 14 years, and the franchise has grossed over $4 billion worldwide. Given its success it’s no great surprise that we now have a fourth film in the series (not counting the two stand-alone Minions movies). Over the course…
A divertimento is a light piece of music, written just to amuse. But it’s a slightly incongruous title for Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar’s portrait of the conductor and composer Zahia Ziouani, because the film tackles some pretty heavy themes. To use a current term, this is an “origin story”; telling how a teenage Ziouani went from the…
The Sitting Duck (La Syndicaliste) is a political thriller based in fact. Director Jean-Paul Salome and co-screenwriter Fadette Drouard craft their story around a trade union official and whistleblower who wasn’t believed after a violent personal attack. The central figure is Maureen Kearney (Isabelle Huppert). In 2012, she worked for a Areva, a French multinational…
Finally, a sequel I can get behind! Maybe it’s got something to do with the fact Pixar have taken nine years to come up with a sequel to 2015’s Inside Out, but they’ve delivered something pretty special with Inside Out 2. I think the main reason this film works is that it actually makes sense….
A former star actor with a dark past tries to make a comeback in Joshua John Miller’s The Exorcism. Russell Crowe plays the actor, Anthony Miller. He’s cast as a priest, Father Arlington, in a supernatural horror film involving an exorcism. Miller was an altar boy who was molested. His wife became very ill with…
