A throwback to a time of homophobia, paranoia and fear, 1985 is a heartfelt realist tale. Having been gone for three years, closeted advertising executive Adrian (Cory Michael Smith) returns to his Texas hometown for the Christmas holidays. As the title suggests, it’s 1985, during the first wave of the AIDS crisis. Burdened with an…
Who would have thought that infrastructure could be made into a compelling movie? The Hummingbird Project deals with the idea that saving a millisecond can make hundreds of millions of dollars. Cousins from New York, Vincent (Jesse Eisenberg) and Anton Zaleski (Alexander Skarsgård) are players in the high-stakes game of High Frequency Trading, where winning…
This quite unconventional Australian film is well worth a look. The combination of a story centring on an opera singer that takes place in an exotic north Queensland castle-like setting makes Celeste notable before the opening frames even commence. There’s a decidedly European flavour to the proceedings, but only up to a point. You can…
Things go bump in the night in the horror-thriller The Curse of the Weeping Woman. It’s the first feature film from director Michael Chaves. James Wan – one of the producers – made an art form out of exploiting the horror genre; specifically the Annabelle franchise. The Curse of the Weeping Woman references the spooky…
The Trouble with You is an absurdist French comedy that’s both clever and silly. I didn’t know whether to delight in its eccentricities or howl at its stupidity, so I flipped from one to the other and back again. Let’s be clear on one thing – the plot is ridiculous. Detective Yvonne Santi (Adèle Haenel)…
California has gone to pot and Sister Kate is front and centre of the crusade in Breaking Habits. She calls herself a nun, but she created her own ministry after her husband blindsided her. Let’s just say life hasn’t exactly been smooth sailing for this former corporate high achiever. As this doco written and directed…
Oscar winning filmmaker Hal Ashby was something of an uncompromising maverick who preferred to work outside the studio system because he believed they valued commerce over art. “Studios are the enemy of the artist,” his friend and mentor Norman Jewison told him rather frankly. Ashby won an Oscar for his work on editing Jewison’s In…
Writer and director Jonah Hill pulls no punches in Mid90s; a coming of age story about a 13-year-old skateboard enthusiast. Hill himself grew up skateboarding in LA in the mid ‘90s, but he maintains the movie is not autobiographical, even though some of the imagery in the film is just as it was back in…
Lisa Spinelli (Maggie Gyllenhaal) is a dedicated kindergarten teacher. But she seems stuck in a sort of midlife crisis. Her homelife is rather dull, and to try and add some spark she has enrolled in an adult poetry writing class in New York, run by the handsome Simon (Gael Garcia Bernal). But he’s initially dismissive…
A quirky, subversive gem, Woman at War gives Icelandic cinema a platform on the world stage. It’s beautifully nuanced and skilfully performed by a small cast. Halla is a 49-year-old Icelandic woman. She’s a respected choir leader, who leads a mysterious double life. Her other self is a passionate environmental activist who flouts the law….
