What do you do when your successful franchise comes to a natural conclusion, but there are still bucks to be milked from your substantial fan-base? Go back to the beginning and tell an origins story is the answer, and Underworld isn’t the only film series this year doing this – look for a Wolverine origins […]
A dystopic vision of a future earth devastated by some disaster of our own making might not seem like fodder for children’s stories, but, like Wall-E earlier in the year, City of Ember takes this grim premise and crafts a film both sweet and full of hope. In the eponymous City of Ember, an […]
Werner Herzog has always been attracted to driven characters: men (for there are few women in his films) on the edge of a madness for life, pushing boundaries, pushing other people, pushing themselves. In two of his most well known films - Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo - the men grappling with the […]
There are times when I have an interesting story to tell or am particularly fond of a certain joke, and I find myself repeating it to friends and colleagues, refining my delivery perfecting the inflections for greatest effect, until I catch myself doing it and, in doing so, realise that I am in danger of […]
Exhilarating and ludicrous, Eagle Eye takes conspiracy theory on an extreme cyber-terrorism ride, packing the screen with non-stop smash and grab action as the clock ticks down on the end of American liberty as we know it. This is the kind of high concept, big budget cinema that Hollywood does best - a handful of […]
One of the most prodigious filmmakers of the last forty years, Woody Allen has had as many misses as hits in his long career – particularly in the last ten years. He churns out his films – one a year – and more often than not writes himself into the story, playing some version of […]
Philip Claudel’s debut feature film I’ve Loved You So Long had its Australian premiere at the Canberra International Film Festival last month and was ranked the second most popular film of the festival, no doubt thanks in part to the performance of Kristen Scott-Thomas as Juliette, its troubled central character. Now the movie is about […]
Weddings do tend, on occasion, to bring out the very worst in folk. The heightened emotions often turn people into complete clichés – clichés that are a comedy gold mine. The makers of Bride Wars mine away to their hearts content.
Those of you with no children or teenagers in the house, or the houses of anyone you have ever met, may have missed the phenomenon that is High School Musical, the 2006 made-for-TV movie from Disney that broke all sorts of sales and viewing records, and spawned a fairly average though equally lucrative sequel in […]
There have been cries, in this the 50th anniversary year of the Australian Film Institute (AFI), that it hasn’t been a very good year for the Australian film industry, and if box-office is the measure you use to judge success, then something is clearly amiss. The combined takings for the four Australian films nominated in […]
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