Film – Reviews Archive

Filmmaker John Waters and drag queen extraordinaire Divine are the undisputed king and queen of filth. Divine tore up the screen in Waters’ cult classics Mondo Trasho, Pink Flamingos and Hairspray. Divine was a trendsetter and a rule breaker. He was counter culture pin up, partied …

In all the arts – music and film especially – many sins can be forgiven if a work has heart. The Beatles’ chirpier songs, The Sound Of Music, most Country music, Sly Stallone’s original Rocky – all beloved by millions, and who …

Miss Nikki and the Tiger Girls is the story of a journey incorporating music, women’s issues, politics and globalisation, produced in a country at a time of massive societal and political change. We first meet the Tiger Girls in 2010 when Myanmar is …

Imagine falling asleep right there in the cinema, at a film festival with films screening back to back. Suddenly, a strange man who doesn’t belong in these movies breaks the fourth wall and begins addressing you about how the films are affecting …

“I don’t get it,”  my 14-year-old whispered half way through The Great Gatsby. “It’s a love triangle between Gatsby, Daisy and Daisy’s husband,” I explained. Having read F Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel in anticipation of Baz Luhrmann’s new film, I had a …

Gone are the days when short films seemed to be arcane academic exercises you wished you had the requisite university degree to understand – or even worse, the kind of one-joke chucklers I used to yawn through at Tropfest. These days short …

  Daniel Algrant’s Greetings from Tim Buckley is a feature of this year’s Sydney Film Festival, a festival humming with music-related films. From portraits of The Warumpi Band’s George Rrurrambu Burarrawanga and a Flemish bluegrass family to a doco on an orphanage …

The concept of a movie revolving around revenge and redemption has been dragged, dusted, re- used and over-killed in Hollywood. There is also no dearth of action thrillers these days, with filmmakers churning them out faster than audiences can consume them. In …

Rene Saavedra is Chile’s answer to Don Draper, a visionary advertising executive who can distil the hopes and dreams of an entire nation into a thirty-second commercial. Rene usually lends his creative genius to selling microwaves and icy cans of cola. But …

The storyline for Oblivion is so good it raised a lot of expectations. Sitting inside a theatre, you want to like Oblivion: presented in silver and grey tones, it has a brilliant star-cast, an intriguing story, a visually-appealing setting, splendid special effects, …