Tag: Fantasy
Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice
Thursday, September 5th, 2024 Film Reviews,Thirty-six years is a long time to wait for a sequel, but Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice feels like it was made immediately after the first film wrapped. The same characters reappear, while sets and props seem to have been carefully preserved against the day they were required for a second installment. Even Michael Keaton in […]
Deadpool & Wolverine
Friday, August 2nd, 2024 Film Reviews,In the Marvel Comics Universe anything less than a billion dollars at the box office is considered a disappointment. The firm’s record is held by Avengers: Endgame (2019) which made a staggering US$2,797,501,328 (AUD $4,267,311,612), placing it a narrow second to James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) on the all-time top earners list. It must have been […]
The Three Musketeers
Saturday, June 8th, 2024 Film Reviews,Why did I wait so long to read Alexandre Dumas? One of literature’s all-time best-sellers, he had to be doing something right. The grandson of a French nobleman and a African slave, Dumas (1802-70) was as unlikely as one of his own plots, and no less successful. He spent money as fast as he made […]
Monster & Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
Friday, May 10th, 2024 Film Reviews,Some directors are known for their car chases, Hirokaru Kore’eda is celebrated for his portrayals of families – big, small, sometimes barely recognisable as such. In Monster, the family consists of only a single mother, Saori Mugino (Sakura Ando), and her 11-year-old son, Minato (Soya Kurokawa), living in a provincial Japanese city. As they sit […]
Dream Scenario & Ferrari
Sunday, January 7th, 2024 Film Reviews,Another year, another burst of films released in time for the awards season. To cover the field expeditiously I’m going to look at two of them: Kristoffer Borgli’s engaging indie, Dream Scenario, and Michael Mann’s bio-pic, Ferrari, which – surprisingly enough – is also an independent production. Dream Scenario may have the smaller budget, but […]
Poor Things
Wednesday, December 27th, 2023 Film Reviews,Imagine Frankenstein remade as a Scottish sex comedy and you’ll be slightly better prepared for Poor Things. I say “slightly” because Yorgos Lanthimos and his favourite scriptwriter, Tony McNamara, have created another bizarre, indefinable production that juggles extremes of vulgarity and profundity. Pay too much attention to the foul language and bare flesh, and you […]
Wonka
Thursday, December 21st, 2023 Film Reviews,Have you ever had that feeling, a few minutes into a film, that you are not its target audience? Welcome to Wonka, a movie so sugary it should carry a health warning for diabetics. Never a scene slips by without some fulsome reference to chocolate, in an endless appeal to the viewer’s “sweet tooth”. It […]
The Hunger Games: the Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes
Thursday, November 23rd, 2023 Film Reviews,It’s hard to believe it’s been eight years since the last Hunger Games movie, the fourth part of a ‘Hollywood trilogy’. Those films drew on the star power of Jennifer Lawrence as heroine, Katniss Everdeen, but the actor’s light has dimmed in recent years, the low point being the dismal sex comedy, No Hard Feelings […]
The Creator
Friday, September 29th, 2023 Film Reviews,Made for a mere US$80 million, The Creator is a cut-price Hollywood blockbuster. The usual bill for one of these extravaganzas is north of US$ 300 million, but British director, Gareth Edwards, has managed to eliminate the waste that causes those pesky budgets to blow out. In the process, he may have made himself the […]
Asteroid City
Saturday, August 12th, 2023 Film Reviews,Whatever Wes Anderson is doing it might be better classified as ‘art’ rather than cinema. This was confirmed when he received invitations from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, and the Fondazione Prada in Milan, to create exhibitions in 2018-2020. The Prada had already shown its affection for the director by getting him to design a […]