In Midnight Family, the audience become front seat passengers riding along with the Ochoa family in Mexico City after dark. Underground private ambulances compete for patients, beg for money and pay police bribes. The government operates fewer than 45 emergency ambulances in Mexico City for a population of nine million. The documentary explores urgent questions…
You’ve next seen a family Christmas quite like this before. Australian Realness has each cast member playing dual roles – one bourgeois and the other uncouth. The time frame is Australia in the late ‘90s. The posh and haughty meet the rough and ready. And for one heavily pregnant family member, a dream quickly turns…
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…
Trustees is an obscure work that’s bound to polarise audiences. It’s also bold, audacious and evocative. I’m not convinced I made sense of it all. When the 90-minute play starts, five actors appear on stage One is a moderator, and the other four are on either side of a debate hosted by a (fictitious) body…
Esoteric claptrap or a masterful and challenging work? There’ll be advocates on both sides with The Square, which won the Palme d’Or at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival. It’s slow moving and tortuously long. I defy anyone to neatly make sense of it all because there are undoubtedly obtuse elements. Underpinning it is the meaning of art….
Ambition and success sometimes don’t go hand-in-hand. With a heavyweight pedigree and intellectual heft, George Clooney’s latest, Suburbicon, should (by rights) be up there with his best. Yet this undoubtedly ambitious but deeply flawed film dallies with greatness without ever fully achieving it. With the backing of the Coen brothers and Clooney’s go-to collaborator George…
