Tag: horror
Renfield
Friday, June 2nd, 2023 Film Reviews,After watching Renfield I walked back to the car, switched on the ignition and was greeted by strains of Bela Lugosi’s Dead, by the original Goth band, Bauhaus. “No,” I thought. “Bela Lugosi is not dead! He’s very much alive and goes by the name of Nicolas Cage.” In the context of Cage’s roller-coaster career, […]
Beau is Afraid
Friday, April 21st, 2023 Film Reviews,Ari Aster is a director who suffers from a bad case of David Lynch envy. His previous two features, Hereditary and Midsommar, were unusual enough to appeal to those with cultish tastes, but Beau is Afraid is more Twin Peaks than Twin Peaks. Alas, multiple peaks also entail multiple troughs, and this film lingers most […]
Peter Booth
Tuesday, March 7th, 2023 Sydney Morning Herald Column,There can be few exhibitions in Australia that have shocked viewers as thoroughly as Peter Booth’s show at Melbourne’s Pinacotheca Gallery in late 1977. The most telling comparison might be with American painter, Philip Guston, whose 1970 show at Marlborough Galleries, New York, was greeted with scorn by leading critics, including Robert Hughes. In both […]
The Menu
Saturday, November 26th, 2022 Film Reviews,There is an entire genre of films devoted to food and restaurants, but The Menuis something different. A foodie horror movie, it’s also a comedy of the very blackest hue – darker than caviar and ladled out in equally parsimonious spoonfuls. It’s not the first feature that has remorselessly satirised trendy people paying a fortune […]
Nope
Friday, August 12th, 2022 Film Reviews,Jordan Peel has enjoyed a meteoric rise from the margins to the mainstream in the space of only three features. Peel’s debut effort, Get Out (2017), had all the hallmarks of a cult classic. An off-beat zombie movie with a political subtext, it gave a dark, satirical twist to those racial anxieties that have divided […]
Nightmare Alley
Friday, January 21st, 2022 Film Reviews,Nightmare Alley reads like it was written for Guillermo del Toro. A pulp novel with literary pretentions, William Lindsay Gresham’s masterpiece was acclaimed and denounced when it appeared in 1946. The language was obscene, the sexual content too brazen, the picture of human nature it painted, too bleak and brutal. The book was intermittently banned, […]
Last Night in Soho
Friday, November 26th, 2021 Film Reviews,Every movie made by British director, Edgar Wright, feels like a classic hits compilation album. With pop songs of the 1960s and 70s being belted out at regular intervals it gives the impression the action has been tailored to match the soundtrack. Baby Driver (2017) took its title from a Simon and Garfunkel song, and […]
Antlers
Thursday, October 28th, 2021 Film Reviews,After months at home sampling streaming menus Australia is ready to go back to the movies. In November the floodgates will open with the Sydney Film Festival, the Italian Film Festival and the British Film Festival. The most high-profile new releases will include the long-delayed James Bond flick, No Time to Die; the latest superhero […]
Lamb
Thursday, October 14th, 2021 Film Reviews,“It’s not a child, it’s an animal!” Or is it? After watching this strange, introverted chiller from Iceland you’ll never feel comfortable hearing someone refer to a baby as “a little lamb”. Like all Icelandic movies, Valdimar Johannsson’s debut feature, co-written with the novelist, Sjón, is strong on landscape. The screen is filled with sweeping […]
Chapelwaite
Friday, September 3rd, 2021 Film Reviews,Chapelwaite is based on Jerusalem’s Lot, a 1978 short story by Stephen King, America’s veteran monarch of horror pulp. Like most best-sellers King is a patchy writer but this hasn’t prevented his books from being turned into an endless stream of Hollywood movies, some of them as good as Carrie (1976) or The Shining (1980). […]