Director Thomas Vinterberg is probably best known for co-founding the Dogme 95 movement, along with fellow Dane and agent provocateur, Lars Von Trier. Vinterberg’s debut feature, Festen (The Celebration), was a deliciously dark comedy, but since that film he’s generally played it a lot safer than his aforementioned compatriot. I had hoped that Another Round,…
Sandra Wollner’s new film makes its Australian debut at an interesting time. The debate around any kind of depiction of the sexualisation of minors has been burning hot, with Netflix’s bungled launch of Cuties a notable example of the intensity inherent in the discourse. The Trouble With Being Born has itself not arrived unscathed. It…
Stories about musicians seeking a seemingly unattainable perfection aren’t in short supply. The most obvious recent example is Whiplash, where Damien Chazelle transformed the arduous struggle between student and teacher—which isn’t easy to make exciting—into an electrifying cat-and-mouse thriller. With The Disciple, director Chaitanya Tamhane takes a more sedate approach, trusting the audience to remain…
Sherlock Holmes films, television shows, and books have been a staple of the media landscape since Sir Arthur Conan Doyle first penned the original novels, with the character appearing in more standalone works than perhaps any other and being referenced or even showing up in hundreds more works, so it’s little surprise that now we…
Resin is a film that sounds better on paper. This isn’t to say it’s a bad film; it’s shot with a dreamy softness, and its superficial idyllic atmosphere gives it a distinct aesthetic. Still derivative of every other isolated-descent-into-madness films, it takes the typical “living in the woods psychologically affects children” story, and makes it…
It’s hard out here for a Tinsel Town A-Lister. Consider Ben Affleck, once a Miramax Golden Boy, leading man, Oscar-winning writer, and a lauded director of a Best Picture winner, no less. If you believe everything you read, you’d be convinced that Ben’s been having a tough time of late, the last 5 years being…
There’s something so comforting about walking into a theater and walking out of it two hours later with the exact same head on your shoulders. These films that deliberately avoid the destruction and reconstruction of the soul that comes from great art, instead focusing on a simple reiteration of what one comes to expect from…
Autobiographical films are like a form of artistic therapy, and often their value is dependent on the audience’s ability to connect their own personal experiences with those being portrayed. Some are engrossing, like this year’s The Souvenir, where Joanna Hogg presents semi-disconnected moments of her life that play out like an elliptical collage of memories.…
Sue me, it’s sweet. Netflix’s 2019 drunken shout into the void to say “listen up chucklefucks it’s Christmas time,” Let It Snow, following four interconnected stories of high schoolers trying to navigate love and the future on Christmas Eve in a small town, is the sort of movie that ends with Joan Cusack’s narration saying…
“Future shit!“ The Terminator is back, and this time it’s newest model, Dark Fate, has quite a loud message to roar at you, THE FUTURE IS FEMALE. A message that can certainly be appreciated, doesn’t necessarily play out as resonant as you’d expect. For a franchise that has been dead since it’s second all-time classic…
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