Should a film set in ancient times be historically accurate and politically correct? If it is politically correct then can it possibly be historically accurate? And vice versa?
As a man in his 50s featuring all the normals for someone of my age – middle-age spread, tinnitus and going grey and bald to name a few – but still fit, physical, clever and switched-on to name even more, my attraction to The Substance was admittedly driven in large part by my attraction to 61-year-old Demi Moore.
The challenging thing about a film set as a sequel between two classics is just watching and enjoying it as opposed to constantly comparing it to the classics.
Lights, cameras, action. Okay, so photography is a significant focus of Civil War and isn’t a thing with Monkey Man but both films are sensually extreme, featuring lots of spectacular visual moments, heaps of action and awesome intense sound.
Can three sci-fi or fantasy novels fit into two or three movies? If you haven’t read the original Dune “series” of three books in one then following Dune Part Two will be as much a challenge as following the Lord of the Rings movies if you hadn’t read J.R.R. Tolkien’s three books.
Poor Things is surreal, deep and meaningful, tiptoes around political correctness, varies between darkly comic and slapstick, and is sexually complex. If that sounds like you, then Poor Things is your perfect film – and you’re an immense character much like most of the characters in the film.
The 2023 Napoleon film is truly an epic. It has awesome battle scenes and historical sequences. Indeed all 180 films featuring Napoleon Bonaparte since 1897 no doubt have epic elements.
Past Lives probably comes down to sliding doors moments – those regrettable, questionable and/or unavoidable decisions and events which led to one thing happening instead of another. Past Lives prompts those memories and leads you to reflect on what could have been.
For a film inspired by true events, the terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015 and the subsequent police hunt for the terrorists, no other film feels as real as November. Indeed, so edge-of-the-seat fascinating is the film it is almost more docudrama than biopic.
‘Where Triangle of Sadness does resemble Monty Python is that it operates at two levels, writes SSH film reviewer Lindsay Cohen. ‘Every comic scene is underwritten by social commentary, with insights into racism, sexism, socio-economics and politics.’
It is worth seeing Decision to Leave. It’s the official submission of South Korea for the Best International Feature Film category of the 2023 Academy Awards after all ...
Redfern-based filmmaker Renée Brack's new feature documentary Ticketyboo explores dementia from a very personal perspective: her father died from Alzheimer’s disease. The film received a standing ovation at July 30 premiere at the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival.
Belgian director Lukas Dhont has won Sydney Film Festival’s $60,000 Sydney Film Prize for his queer teen tragedy Close, which portrays a powerful friendship between two 13-year-old boys that is severed as they transition to high school — with tragic results.
The Australian premiere of Pissarro: Father of Impressionism is in May. The 90-minute documentary, celebrates an incredible artist, without whom the Impressionist movement may never have begun or endured.
The Batman doesn’t want to be a superhero film but unfortunately ultimately is. It’s torn between standard Marvel and DC story lines and trying to be a deep and complex noir thriller.
In House of Gucci, by corrupting a true story that would make for a great documentary so that it could fit a simpler and more standard movie arc, Scott has mangled everything so much that very little works.
It took only four months to see Nine Days. The week we went into lockdown was the week I was scheduled to see a critics’ screening of the film. So, to say I was eagerly looking forward to finally seeing it is an understatement.
Filmed over five years, I’m Wanita is the story of Wanita Bahtiyar, flamboyant country singer from Tamworth, as she heads to the US to realise her lifelong dream of recording an album in Nashville, honkytonk capital of the world.
The Courier is “based on a true story”. Benedict Cumberbatch’s Greville Wynne really was a businessman recruited by MI6 during the Cold War to undertake Soviet Union intelligence gathering activities.
My fear about Another Round was that it would get all preachy about the dangers of drinking to excess and chart the inevitable descent of all involved ...
Sacha Baron Cohen’s movie is essentially a series of skits and pranks aimed at easy-target right-wing Trump-supporting Americans in an effort to demonstrate their ignorance.
To say that Tenet is a time-travel sci-fi film really doesn’t do it justice. Time isn’t travelled so much as it is scrunched up and folded over multiple times.
To say that Tenet is a time-travel sci-fi film really doesn’t do it justice. Time isn’t travelled so much as it is scrunched up and folded over multiple times.
To say that Tenet is a time-travel sci-fi film really doesn’t do it justice. Time isn’t travelled so much as it is scrunched up and folded over multiple times.
Lost ways. Lost bees. Lost serenity. It would be hard to watch this twice Oscar-nominated documentary and not feel devastated for Hatidze Muratova – one of the last Macedonian wild beekeepers.
In this weird sports-free world, sports junkies such as yours truly are looking far and wide for their fix. Bring on the sports documentary series, a relatively new phenomenon tailor made for the pay-per-view generation.
1917 is not a great WW1 film, but is a great piece of film-making. You probably know by now that it was all filmed in one simulated shot, using some very clever CGI, pin-point editing and some technical wizardry. And it works.
Queen & Slim reminds us there are other issues, also of life and death, that will persist well past the time that Covid-19 becomes as common as the cold and they shouldn’t be forgotten or ignored.
1917 is not a great WW1 film, but is a great piece of film-making. You probably know by now that it was all filmed in one simulated shot, using some very clever CGI, pin-point editing and some technical wizardry. And it works.
On the Kubrick-Lucas spectrum (trademark pending), where Kubrick sci-fi films are intense and moody and so deep you can’t see the bottom of them, and Lucas sci-fi films are operatic and melodramatic and fun, with plenty of weird looking aliens, Ad Astra definitely tends Kubrick.
If the preview I saw of Men in Black: International was a Sydney Film Festival (SFF) film rather than just showing at the same time as the SFF, people would have walked out on it.
