Nothing strikes terror in the heart of parents quite like the thought of calamity befalling their children. But in writer/director Maren Ade’s already legendary (and freshly Oscar-nominated) German dramedy Toni Erdmann, a father inflicts …
Read More →First published on Flicks on November 27, 2020
The 25th anniversary of Terry Gilliam’s time travelling classic, about a world struck by a deadly virus, arrives during a year marked by a real-life pandemic. Critic …
Read More →First published on Flicks on October 9, 2018
To define a Paul Greengrass film as “intensely realistic” is to offer a description so commonly used and self-evident it comes close to meaning nothing at all. …
Read More →First published on The Guardian on April 4, 2019
Nobody predicted the immense success of Australian Damon Gameau’s 2015 directorial debut, That Sugar Film, a candy-coloured, Supersize Me-esque documentary exploring the effects of consuming sugar …
Read More →First published on The Guardian on October 17, 2018.
There is something both audacious and defeatist about writers of wrong-side-of-the-tracks stories who delight in obsessing over abominable characters and then, in a last-ditch …
Read More →The title of writer/director George Nolfi’s SCI-FI action romance The Adjustment Bureau is one of the least enticing of recent times. Those three uninspiring words do make sense in a story context; they sound like a description …
Read More →There is something perversely amusing about watching a pulpy B-grade movie pursue extreme historical revisionism. The title is as high concept as they come: a pithy description of what lies in store for audiences, should they …
Read More →If you could go back in time whenever you wanted, and introduce yourself to a person you had a crush on, again and again, refining your pick up moves until eventually this person fell for you, …
Read More →Taylor “that other guy from Twilight” Lautner scores his first starring role as an on-the-run knucklehead in Abduction, director John Singleton’s vacuous low-rent riff on The Fugitive (1993).
If nothing else, Lautner has found consistency with his emerging oeuvre: a …
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If any Australian film is the spiritual equivalent of a John Hughes movie it would have to be The Big Steal, director Nadia Tass’s 1990 puberty blues revenge romp about a brash but wily teenager …
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