Hercules is once again back on our screens. This latest version has Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson in the title role, alongside an international cast which includes a host of British stars. John Hurt is Cotys…
Walt Disney is, to many people, the most influential person who has been in film. And after all, he garnered the most accolades, receiving as many as 59 Oscar nominations. But there’s another film titan…
Matthew McConaughey won an Oscar for his performance in Dallas Buyers Club – but films about the contemporary experience of life with HIV/AIDS are in short supply.
EPA/ETTORE FERRARI
Consider the last three major films gracing our screens that explicitly deal with HIV/AIDS – the Academy Award-winning, highly acclaimed Dallas Buyers Club in 2013, followed by Ryan Murphy’s much-hyped…
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes continues with the premise of the original.
Twentieth Century Fox
As Dawn of the Planet of the Apes opens, it’s worth remembering that the racial conflicts and the struggle for civil rights in the 1960s underpin the original films. The traditional evolutionary hierarchy…
David Gulpilil starts in Rolf de Heer’s new film Charlie’s Country, a subversive comedy shot in the Northern Territory.
Image.net/Entertainment One films
Rolf de Heer’s new film Charlie’s Country, which opened yesterday, examines the day-to-day experiences of an older man in Arnhem Land as he struggles for independence and respect in his home town. The…
The tan-tastic trailer for Ridley Scott’s new epic Exodus: Gods and Kings was recently released, to lukewarm response. What I find most striking about the trailer is not, as you might expect, Christian…
I’m trying to figure out why I’m so disheartened with the movies this summer. It’s true that the season began badly. Marc Webb’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2 was a disappointment. The aerial sequences at the…
Vidal sprinkled an almost limitless supply of bon-mots across our recent history.
Antidote Films
Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia – by the Australian film-maker Nicholas Wrathall – has been doing the rounds of festival circuits since its release last year, and is currently showing at special…
What do The Amazing Spider-Man 2, X-Men: Days of Future Past, and Godzilla have in common? Aside from belonging to the summer blockbuster class of 2014, they all feature China in some form or another…
Good Vibrations tells the story of Belfast’s punk scene against the backdrop of the Troubles.
Curious Films
Punk music’s role in overcoming sectarian divides during one of the bloodiest chapters in northern Irish history isn’t a topic we hear much about. But that’s the subject of the film Good Vibrations, currently…
Lucy Briggs Owen as Viola and Tom Bateman as Will Shakespeare.
Simon Turtle SML
I don’t really go in for creative mash-ups. You know: Alien vs. Predator, or the films where Superman goes head to head with six baddies from different comics, only helped by Spider Man and Wonder Woman…
Death in Paradise has proven a rating’s hit for the ABC – why would that be?
ABC
Television is a voracious medium – and yet I would argue many of those commissioning screen content in Australia have little appetite for experimentation. Australia’s digital free-to-air service, in metropolitan…
‘PINEWOOD’: soon to be emblazoned on a British hillside.
If someone asked you to think of a British film, what would come to mind? For some years now, the most likely answer would have been any of the select but powerful band of little films that made good on…
Norman McLaren working on Begone Dull Care, 1949.
National Film Board of Canada
Animation is all around us – from Pixar to manga to animated gifs. As with any creative field, it has its unsung heroes – the innovators who have shaped and defined the art form. So it was a great delight…
This article contains spoilers. Some reviewers have somewhat lazily compared Amma Asante’s recently opened film Belle to the Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave, that other film about slavery. But this entirely…
Belgian star Marion Cotillard in Two Days, One Night.
Sydney Film Festval
The Sydney Film Festival concluded last night with the announcement of the winner of the Sydney Film Prize, a not insignificant award for best film in the Official Competition. It was awarded this year…
It has been almost a truism of television, in the discussions of professionals and the analyses of academics, that television broadcasting is a sound medium with added pictures, while cinema is a visual…
Director Richard Linklater goes for the complexity of lived time in Boyhood.
Sydney Film Festival
Boyhood is the front-runner in this year’s Sydney Film Festival Competition, to be decided on Sunday. In it, American writer and director Richard Linklater looks at a young boy’s life from the beginning…
The challenge for the documentary filmmaker is to persuade the viewer to take the images and sounds with which they are presented for the world itself. The documentary viewer willingly collaborates in…
Melodrama makes the universe morally legible.
Sydney Film Festval
The phone connection illuminates the dashboard screen. “Ivan Locke,” says the man behind the wheel. “Ivan. Where are you?” says a woman’s voice. “I’m in the car,” he replies. This direct way of answering…