Turning Agatha Christie murder mysteries into popular cinema is proving quite lucrative. So it’s not surprising that for the third time Kenneth Branagh has teamed with writer Michael Green to adapt Christie’s late (1969) novel Hallowe’en Party for A Haunting in Venice. The unsettling supernatural thriller follows the success of Murder on the Orient Express…
Veronica Lando’s first novel The Whispering won the 2021 Banjo Prize for best unpublished manuscript. That book, set in the rainforests of Far North Queensland involved a man returning to a small rural town, and being caught up in a mystery involving two deaths seventeen years apart. Her follow up, The Drowning Girls, feels cut…
For a film featuring several brutal murders, Neil Jordan’s Marlowe is oddly bloodless. That’s not to say it’s bad – it has many fine things going for it – but it lacks the grit those familiar with Raymond Chandler’s iconic detective may be expecting. That could have something to do with the fact the source…
The internet features prominently in the compelling new psychological thriller Missing from writer-directors Will Merrick and Nicholas Johnson. The film starts in San Antonio on April 13th, 2008. As caught on video camera, a father, James (Tim Griffin), is playing with his young daughter June (Ava Lee) when a trickle of blood is seen coming…
In M. Night Shyamalan’s intriguing psychological thriller, Knock at the Cabin, Kristen Cui plays eight-year-old Wen – a bright young girl who collects grasshoppers so she can study them. She’s special because she was adopted by her two dads – Andrew (Ben Aldridge) and Eric (Jonathan Groff) – when she was only a baby. Now…
There are some writers who never do the same thing twice. Two books is probably not enough to say there is a pattern, but it was a surprise to find the follow up to Adam Oyebanji’s space opera debut Braking Day is a contemporary murder mystery with a bit of spy thriller thrown in for…
The church, religion and medical science have a lot to answer for in The Wonder. This is acclaimed director Sebastián Lelio’s first feature since Gloria Bell (2018). In 1862, nurse Lib Wright (Florence Pugh) travels from England to small-town Ireland to watch an 11-year-old girl Anna O’Donnell (Kila Lord Cassidy). The reason soon becomes clear….
The much talked-about Don’t Worry Darling has created some pre-release buzz, not always for the right reasons. But alleged on-set and Venice Film Festival tension should fade into the background when audiences see this very stylish, if somewhat illogical film. But again, the buzz might not always be for the right reasons. Katie Silberman (who…
Greg Woodland’s debut novel The Night Whistler was one of the many new voices in the last few years producing Australian rural crime that sets itself a little apart by also having a historical edge (see also: Matt Nable’s Still, Maryrose Cuskelly’s The Cane and Hayley Scrivenor’s Dirt Town). Set in Moorabool, a New England…
Australian crime author Sulari Gentill is probably best known for her historical Roland Sinclair series. But as her 2018 Ned Kelly Award winning novel Crossing the Lines (also known as When She Wrote Him) showed, she is not above a little meta-textual playing around. In Crossing the Lines, a woman writes a crime novel in…
