The Runner was about a congressman who tried to provide financial support for local fisheries after the disastrous BP oil spill in April 2010. Deepwater Horizon displays in a consistent manner the pure facts on the day of the fatal accident with this oil platform. It could have been just another disaster movie, like I’ve…
A Street Cat Named Bob is a heart-warming and enjoyable film about an unlikely friendship. Based on James Bowen’s best- selling 2013 autobiographical book, this is a feel-good film about how a homeless man turned his life around with the help of a stray ginger cat named Bob. Bowen (played by Luke Treadaway, from Unbroken)…
A bland first act opens up to a brilliant second, akin to a caterpillar metamorphosing into a radiantly colourful butterfly … in the MTC’s production of Born Yesterday, a screwball romance. This American stage classic starts with uncouth junkyard tycoon Harry Brock settling into a swank Washington hotel suite, ready to grease the palms of…
The Flaming Lips have been in the music game for at least 24 years. Within those 24 years they’ve made quite a impact from battling pink robots and wizards, messed with some dead petz, to recording a Christmas album, to celebrating Christmas on Mars, and having mixed results covering albums by the masters including King…
The history of the cinema is littered by well-intentioned but ill-thought-out attempts to bring stage plays to the big screen. The inherent contradiction between the theatre – where dialogue is the focus – and the cinema – where the emphasis is on visuals – sometimes does both the play and the movie in question a…
The moving Australian-produced drama Lion is based on the true story of Saroo Brierley, a young Indian boy from a poor rural family who, the age of five, became separated from his older brother Guddu in his native village and who eventually found his way home a quarter of a century later. Saroo (played by…
The host of the hit TV series The Amazing Race stars in, directs and has co-written Le Ride, a documentary re-creating arguably the harshest Tour de France of them all. Phil Keoghan has always had a fascination with stories about underdogs. He found a book about the history of New Zealand cycling and in it…
As a life lesson, Toni Erdmann is a unique and quirky offering that continually surprises. It contains the mundane and the outrageous. The constant is humour – at times great dollops of it, interspersed with a gentler comic scene or two. German dad Winfried (Peter Simonischek) doesn’t see much of his hard-working corporate consultant daughter…
A sheer enchanting delight from start to finish, Babe The Sheep-Pig has all the charm and magic that made the movie Babe such an audience fancy and critics’ favourite in 1995. It concerns an orphaned piglet that wants to be a sheepdog … after Farmer Hoggett wins her in a “guess the weight” contest at…
A gritty, art house, coming of age tale about a young boy who is bullied and brought up by a single druggie mother, Moonlight plays out as a slice-of-life reality piece. It chronicles a black youngster from primary school age until his early 30s, as he struggles to find his place in the world while…
