Australian filmmakers Danny and Michael Phillipou conjured dark magic with their sensationally unsettling and intense debut horror feature Talk To Me. That film’s success led to them being hailed as the new horror wunderkinds and understandably created feverish anticipation for their follow-up feature, Bring Her Back. While it’s likely that the confrontingly violent and gory Bring Her Back will please
Read moreBeating Hearts sounds like the name of a self-important album from the 80’s and the vibrant but overlong and clichéd French romantic crime drama Beating Hearts (or L’amour Ouf) feels like the movie equivalent of such an album. The film traces the 12-year romance of delinquent thug Clothaire (played by François Civil as an adult and Malik Frikah as a
Read moreFrom its pompous title to its global obliteration scenario to the contrived sweaty earnestness that permeates most scenes, Mission Impossible: Final Reckoning has the undeniable aroma of a film desperately trying to convince us that it is bigger and more important than any other action or spy movie in Hollywood history. There’s full throttle action, sci fi tech paranoia, espionage
Read moreCinemagoers might have thought the Marvel movie onslaught had diminished, well guess what, it’s back! There’s the big-ticket Avengers Doomsday on the horizon and smaller films (by Marvel standards) popping up like Captain America: Brave New World and the latest offering, the oddly paced, uneven but intriguingly introspective Thunderbolts. Thunderbolts is a sequel of sorts to 2021’s disappointing Black Widow
Read moreAnyone who has aspirations of working in a commercial kitchen should not see La Cocina, it will kill those dreams stone dead. While well-acted, at times insightfully written and artfully shot, this extremely bitter pill of a film makes for a fairly miserable night at the movies. La Cocina is set in the kitchen of a fictitious New York restaurant
Read moreGuaranteed to fascinate and infuriate, the Australian/ Irish co-production The Surfer, which stars Nicolas Cage and Julian McMahon is an impressively strange beast. Frequently shifting gears between Wake In Fright-style ‘civilised foreigner meets Aussie ferals’ drama, surreal Twilight Zone-esque moral fable and a critique of the idiotic ‘manosphere’ culture, it constantly challenges our expectations. Fans of the criminally overlooked 1968
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