Fifty years in, it’s safe to say that the James Bond franchise has been a fun but very mixed bag. Indeed, you only have to look at the past two films to see how drastically these movies can vary in quality; Casino Royale – stylish, dramatic and loaded with action – reinvigorated the character and brought him racing into the twenty-first century, only for him to flounder just two years later [...]
Walking out of Miss Bala after it screened at this year’s Sydney Film Festival, two things stood out in my mind. The first was the beautiful camera work. The second was the staggering lead performance. Loosely based on the experiences of a real life Miss Hispanic America, Gerardo Naranjo’s film tells the tale of a beauty pageant contestant caught up for three harrowing days in the brutal Mexican drug war. [...]
Hoodlums and hit-men collide face-first with the recession in Killing Them Softly, a dark, disenchanted and decidedly indelicate new film from actor-producer Brad Pitt and director Andrew Dominick. Adapted from George V. Higgins’ 1974 novel Cogan’s Trade, the film stars Pitt as a professional hit-man tasked with tracking down the men who robbed a mob-protected card-game. But as with Pitt and Dominick’s previous collaboration – the contemplative Western The Assassination [...]
Fasten your seatbelts and securely stow your tray tables away: after an extended sabbatical in the uncanny valley, Robert Zemeckis’ first live-action feature in over a decade is taxiing down the runway. The story of an alcoholic pilot thrust into the media spotlight after a heroic crash landing, Flight takes off in incredible style thanks to a jaw-dropping mid-air disaster scene, only to hit turbulence soon after as a result [...]
“People seem to either really love it or fucking despise it.” There’s no sugar-coating the divisiveness of Hail, the new film from Melbourne based filmmaker Amiel Courtin-Wilson. Known for the documentaries Chasing Buddha, Bastardy and most recently Ben Lee: Catch My Disease, Courtin-Wilson’s first feature narrative came about after an intense six year collaboration with Daniel P. Jones, a former convict turned actor whose life and stories inspired the film, [...]
It’s something of a strange irony that one of the most important Australian films ever made – a film that helped launch the Australian new wave, and influence major local talents like Bruce Beresford, Fred Schepisi and Peter Weir – was actually directed by a Canadian. Ted Kotcheff is the filmmaker, while the film is Wake in Fright: a bleak, dusty, beer-soaked odyssey about a pompous school teacher stranded [...]
