You know how siblings can be. When one gets to do something, the other just has to do it too. So when Joel Coen stepped out of the Coen Brothers cocoon in 2021 to direct the brooding, highly stylised The Tragedy of Macbeth, it was only a matter of time before younger brother Ethan Coen…
Think of the hijinks in Crazy Rich Asians, Bridesmaids and The Hangover and you go some way to understanding why Joy Ride will be a fan favourite. There are laughs, silliness and good times aplenty. As five-year-olds, Audrey and Lolo meet by chance in 1998 at a New York park. Born in Asia, Audrey –…
Tim Minchin’s genius in picking out the best bits of our common Australian experiences and presenting them back to us like a proud parent is evident once again in Upright. Upright opens with Lucky (Minchin), on the wrong side of the country from his mother who is seeing out her last days at home, in…
A filmography featuring Dumb and Dumber To and Shallow Hal doesn’t exactly scream Oscar. Yet director Peter Farrelly finds himself as an Oscar frontrunner for his crowd-pleasing film Green Book. This conventional take on race relations in the American South of the 1960s seems to be carefully designed to push the right buttons. Of all…
This female buddy road movie is firmly aimed at the very same demographic who flocked to films like The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and The Lady in the Van. It‘s more doubtful however that they’ll find that the title here lives up to its promise. The Time of Their Lives promises much but proves to…
It’s one of those vagaries of film distribution that we sometimes get two films released at the same time with similar plots and ideas. Within the space of a couple of weeks we get two road trip movies. Both feature two people on a journey through some of Europe’s most picturesque areas. They sample the history, culture…
Along with Roger Donaldson’s 1977 political thriller Sleeping Dogs (which introduced us to Sam Neill), Geoff Murphy’s fast paced 1981 road movie Goodbye Pork Pie was one of the seminal films in putting New Zealand on the map and establishing the country’s modern film industry. Up until then the bulk of New Zealand productions were…
