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Tag: horror

Art Column

Peter Booth

Tuesday, March 7th, 2023 Art 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 […]

Film Reviews

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 […]

Film Reviews

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 […]

Film Reviews

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, […]

Film Reviews

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 […]

Film Reviews

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 […]

Film Reviews

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 […]

Film Reviews

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). […]

Film Reviews

Deerskin

Friday, August 14th, 2020 Film Reviews,

Until Deerskin came along, the ultimate cinematic love story between a man and an item of clothing must have been F.W.Murnau’s The Last Laugh (AKA. Der letze Mann). In this silent classic of 1924, a German doorman falls in love wth his uniform, suffering all the pangs of an abandoned suitor when he is laid […]

Film Reviews

Shirley

Thursday, July 2nd, 2020 Film Reviews,

It may be the ultimate tribute to a novelist when she becomes the subject of someone else’s fiction, or it may be poetic justice. For the four children of American writer, Shirley Jackson (1916-65), it has been hard to recognise their mother in a new film by Josephine Decker. Although Shirley contains detailed portraits of […]