Australian drama Penguin Bloom is based on the book by Cameron Bloom about his wife Sam Bloom (Naomi Watts) an active and sporty mother of three boys who was left paralysed from the waist down after a fall from a balcony while on holiday in Thailand. Wheelchair bound, unable to continue her career as a nurse and grieving the loss
Read moreGreenberg and Frances Ha director Noah Baumbach’s latest film While We’re Young is an insightful, sporadically funny comedy/drama about artistic integrity, the disappointments of middle age and the cultural clash between Generations X and Y. Oddly this film has been sold as a light relationship comedy but it’s a more substantial film than that. Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts star
Read moreInsurgent is the second instalment in that other dystopian, post-apocalyptic young adult series, Divergent. For those unfamiliar with the saga, it follows the standard template for the young adult adventure genre: sensitive but feisty teen girl Triss (Shailene Woodley) becomes a freedom fighter battling an oppressive government and it’s smug leader, the ice cold Jeanine (Kate Winslet) and hooks up
Read moreAlejandro González Iñárritu’s idiosyncratic serio-comic take on the machinations of theatre, the decline of cinema and the fickleness of celebrity, Birdman, has been the toast of international film festivals meaning it has arrived on our shores carrying the weight of enormous expectation. That sort expectation often leads to disappointment and that is to some extent the case here. While this
Read moreSt Vincent is a charming if flawed feel-good comedy drama that provides another showcase for Bill Murray’s amusing brand of misanthropy. Murray plays Vincent a familiar figure in American cinema, the rude, miserable, middle-aged grump neighbour who disdains anyone interfering with his self-contained, self-serving world. When his new neighbour, kindly single mum Maggie (Melissa McCarthy) is forced to work late,
Read moreIf anyone had read the popular film websites’ scathing reviews of the Princess Di biopic Diana they might have been anticipating the film’s arrival on our shores about as eagerly as Australians awaiting the radiation cloud in On the Beach. Diana is undoubtedly a disappointing film with a thin script that covers only a small portion of Diana’s life, bland
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