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 [...]

Anna Faris has a truly enviable quality about her. It’s one that makes her nigh-on impossible to dislike whilst onscreen, one that manages to ooze an easy charm, no matter the level of mediocrity surrounding her. It’s the very same quality that makes her the quintessential air-head blonde, the quality that made her far and beyond the best thing about the Scary Movie franchise. I’d go as far as to declare Anna Faris as [...]

The sophomore effort of writer/director Jeff Nichols (Shotgun Stories), Take Shelter calls to mind the story of Noah, only to repaint the biblical hero as a paranoid schizophrenic. It begins when a Middle American family man named Curtis LaForche, played with ground-shaking intensity by Michael Shannon (Revolutionary Road), becomes convinced that an apocalyptic storm is just beyond the horizon and is compelled to take drastic action in order to [...]

Glenn Ficarra and John Requa’s previous film, I Love You Phillip Morris, was one of the funniest and most moving romantic dramedy’s of the past few years, but went tragically underseen because it focused on a gay love story. Their follow up is a similarly heartfelt, but decidedly broader and more mainstream affair entitled Crazy, Stupid, Love. Juggling multiple love stories – not always successfully – is a film that [...]

Hideously photographed and generically told, but the inherently compelling real-world subject matter of Larysa Kondracki’s The Whistleblower ensures that the film remains somewhat engaging, though largely by default. A grim and grizzly tale of political corruption and human exploitation based on actual events, the film stars Rachel Weisz as a Nebraska cop assigned to the United Nations as part of a peace-keeping force in post-civil war Bosnia who uncovers a [...]

If you thought Jason Bateman sniffing a cup of sperm in the poster for last year’s The Switch was distasteful, I’m dying to know what colourful adjectives you’d use to describe a scene in The Change-Up where the actor is showered in the mouth with baby poo.  Keep in mind that this is the first joke of the movie, so don’t go wasting all your best [...]

Although the sword-and-sorcery subgenre has experienced something of a revival of late, there is a glaring lack of evidence — aside from HBO’s Game of Thrones — to suggest that this has been a good thing. Days would surely be sunnier had Clash of the Titans, Season of the Witch and Your Highness never existed, but exist they do, [...]

If there is one film this year that I have no real right to complain about being let-down by, then Jesse Eisener’s throw-back to exploitation cinema Hobo With A Shotgun must surely be it. Evolved from the fake trailers that won a competition to play in front of the Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino 2007 film Grindhouse, it is a move that — in the simplest sense of the phrase — delivers [...]