With the lucrative Harry Potter franchise done and dusted, author J K Rowling has expanded on her Potterverse with this stand alone tale set some seven decades before the adventures of the boy wizard. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them serves as the launching pad for a new post-Potter franchise set against the world…
Stunning, finely rendered and detailed animation in the Japanese anime style is the hallmark of Your Name, a youth fantasy written and directed by Makoto Shinkai, who also wrote a novel of the same name. It concerns a mysterious connection between two pupils – strangers – living different lives in disparate parts of Japan. Mitsuha…
Cinematographer David Parker has, with his wife writer/director Nadia Tass, created some of the best Australian comedies, with the classics Malcolm and The Big Steal. But when branching out as a filmmaker on his own the results have been a little less spectacular. With The Menkoff Method Parker steps back into the director’s chair for…
Korea’s official entry into the Best Foreign Language film category for the 2017 Oscars, The Age of Shadows is a mix of spy thriller and action movie that was inspired by the real life 1923 bombing of Seoul’s police headquarters by the resistance movement. The Age of Shadows is set in Seoul in the 1920’s,…
Award-winning Irish born, British raised, writer-director John Michael McDonagh’s (Calvary) latest effort on the silver screen is stylised, dark humoured and ultra violent. The buddy crime caper was filmed on location in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with a final week in Reykjavik, Iceland. It is about two corrupt cops in New Mexico (Alexander Skarsgård and Michael…
Happiness is the name of the game for two inpatients at a progressive psychiatric institution, both of whom are trying to attain it in Like Crazy. Beatrice speaks at a thousand miles an hour and is easily worked up. She is a self-styled billionaire countess who likes to believe she is on intimate terms with…
Bold and provocative, Thomas Ian Doyle’s latest work – The Upstairs Trilogy Part 1: The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name – tackles a futuristic Australian government that has found a way to “correct” same sex relationships. Homosexuality is outlawed and a simple, painless two-dose injection – with minimal side effects, if any – subjugates…
British filmmaker Andrea Arnold has given us a sometimes bleak view on listless British youth with films like Fish Tank, but with her latest film she has turns her discerning view on America. We are introduced to a motley crew of youngsters who travel around America’s Midwest selling magazine subscriptions door to door. It is…
Not to be confused with Paul Verhoeven’s recent dark and disturbing psychological thriller Elle, Ella is a documentary about Ella Havelka, the first indigenous dancer with the Australian Ballet in the company’s fifty year history. Born and raised in the small town of Dubbo, Havelka is a descendant of the Wiradjuri people but was passionate…
Speed-the-Plow, by David Mamet was written in 1988 and starred Madonna in its first outing. It concerns two lowly-runged ‘goers’ in the Hollywood hierarchy trying to get further up the ladder with the power to ‘green light’ the production of films. Charlie Fox (Lachy Hulme) brings to his ambitious friend/ally, the corporation favoured Bobby Gould…
