One of the year’s most difficult to watch films is also one of its finest. Adapted from the award winning novel by Lionel Shriver, We Need To Talk About Kevin is a stunning psychological drama and thriller that will set crawling the skin of anyone who watches it… and it will do so without a depicting a single moment of  violence. With mesmerizing control over her craft, Scottish director Lynne [...]

In 2004, Cameron Doomadgee, a resident of an Aboriginal community in Queensland’s Palm Island, was arrested after swearing at police. Forty-five minutes later he was dead in custody, with injuries consistent with a severe beating. The arresting officer, a 6’ 7’’ tall senior sergeant named Chris Hurley, denied any wrongdoing, but after an investigation – one that was hampered by extensive media coverage and frequent accusations of bias and corruption [...]

In both its non-linear structure and its astounding visual composition, Burning Man is a bit like Terrance Malick’s The Tree of Life. Written and directed by Jonathan Teplitzky (Better Than Sex), the Australian drama presents a series of beautifully composed images and scenes that make up the memories from the life and marriage of it’s lead character, a cocky English chef [...]

You can officially add Na Hong-jin to the growing list of South Korean directors outdoing ninety-five percent of their Hollywood counterparts. After debuting with the critically acclaimed The Chaser in 2009, Na’s follow-up is an artful, absorbing and exceedingly violent crime thriller called The Yellow Sea, a film that bears all the style and splatter that characterizes the work of Park Chan-wook (Oldboy), Bong Joon-ho (The Host) and Kim Ji-Woon [...]

With advertisements proudly emblazoned with the words “exotic, erotic and just plain psychotic” and a programme headlined by films with titles like Karate-Robo Zaborgar and Invasion of Alien Bikini, the first annual Fantastic Asia Film Festival (FAFF) promises to bring a very different breed of Asian filmmaking to Melbourne’s Cinema Nova.

Screening a combined twenty films from Japan, South Korea, China, Hong Kong and the Philippines, FAFF aims to shine special [...]

It is surely no coincidence that most prominently displayed amongst Iranian filmmaker Jafar Pahani’s DVD collection is a copy of Rodrigo Cortés’ Buried starring Ryan Reynolds. The story of a man trapped against his will and being slowly suffocated by his surroundings, the similarities between the plot of Buried and the real life predicament of Pahani are all too readily apparent. Director of critically acclaimed films such [...]

Directed by Canadian graphic novel artist Troy Nixey, and written and produced by acclaimed Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth), the new version of Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark is from its prologue to its conclusion a miscalculated exercise in generic genre film making. Based on a 1973 TV movie and minor cult classic of the same name, the film is a creaky, cobwebby haunted house affair about [...]

Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive it is a perfectly measured work of cinematic style and artistry. The story of a Hollywood stuntman (Ryan Gosling; Crazy, Stupid, Love) who moonlights as a getaway driver, it glides with perfect pace and rhythm like a shark through midnight waters, masquerading as a mainstream action movie when it is in fact a slow-burning art-house drama – albeit one with an ultra-violent edge. Engrossing from [...]