40 Years of KOYAANISQATSI - review
“If we dig precious things from the land, we will invite disaster.” “Near the Day of Purification, there will be cobwebs spun back and forth in the sky” “A container of ashes might one day be thrown…
Films
786 posts
Cairo Conspiracy (Walad min al-Janna) Review -Strips Away at Faith and Politics in Contemporary Egypt
Egypt’s recent history is one of revolution, counter-revolution, and state and religious oppression. Censorship means that films about contemporary Egypt are never to be negative of critical of the cu…
Sisi & I (Sisi & Ich) Review – A Radical Portrayal of The Empress Elisabeth of Austria’s Life
Sisi & I will be playing at the German Film Festival all through May 2023 at your local Palace Cinemas. The Empress Elisabeth of Austria’s life is well documented, scrutinised, and mourned over.…
Beau Is Afraid Review – A Carnival of Dreams, Nightmares, and Mothers
When Ari Aster was a boy, his mother took him to watch The Piano Teacher; a psychosexual drama with twists of sex, loneliness, cruelty, and an overbearing mother. He has since declared that this was o…
Evil Dead Rise Review - A Gleefully Violent, Sickeningly Twisted and Torturous Film
The Evil Dead franchise is one that has been through a number of interesting iterations through its time in the pop culture zeitgeist. Beginning in 1981 with Sam Raimi’s impeccable trilogy of The Evil…
Beau is Afraid Review - ...And You Should Be Too
There is no doubting that the titular Beau (Joaquin Phoenix) is most certainly afraid in Ari Aster’s dark absurdist comedy Beau is Afraid. Beau has every reason to be afraid in Aster’s mashup of The B…
Mafia Mamma Review – The Drought of Good Catherine Hardwicke Films Continues
Catherine Hardwicke’s career as a director is hard to pin down. Her brilliant first film Thirteen (2003) co-written by Nikki Reed was a blistering investigation into disenfranchised teenagers. Her fol…
A Good Person Review - Zach Braff Delivers an Uneven Melodrama About Grief, Addiction, and Redemption
In 2004 Zach Braff pivoted from acting into writing and directing with his debut feature Garden State. The film utilised the best of Braff’s skills as an actor and won an Independent Spirit Award in 2…
November (Novembre) Review - A Propulsive Manhunt Thriller About the 2015 Paris Attacks
The world was shocked by the terrorist attacks in Paris in November 2015. Director Cédric Jimenez’s fictionalised procedural November concentrates on the vast manhunt undertaken by the French security…
The Giants Review – A Rallying Call for the Environment and the World We Live In
“Can you imagine Australia without Bob Brown?” says Christine Milne in the biographical/ecological documentary The Giants by co-directors Rachel Antony and Laurence Billiet. A young doctor moved to Ta…
The Survival of Kindness Review - An Unsubtle Film About the Brutality of Humanity
When Margaret Atwood wrote her feminist genre fable ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ in the mid 1980s she was using precedent that would become prescience. It is the paradigm of persistent cruelty in culture tha…
The Pope’s Exorcist Review - A Passionless Papal Adventure That Lacks Any Divine Intervention
Powered by JustWatch Russell Crowe has been campaigning hard for Julius Avery’s new experiment, intrigued at the idea of playing an exorcist whose key contact is none other than the Pope himself…