Category: Reviews
Review – Zack Snyder’s Justice League (2021)
Director: Zack Snyder
Starring: Ben Affleck, Gal Gadot, Ray Fisher, Jason Mamoa, Ezra Miller, Henry Cavill, Ciaran Hinds, Amy Adams, Jeremy Irons, Diane Lane
Before you can appropriately assess the merits of Zack Snyder’s Justice League, you must first address the false premise under which the film has been marketed. When Warner Brothers’ 2017 superhero team-up Justice League fell flat with audiences and reviewers alike, it didn’t take long for online defenders of the franchise to apportion blame to director Joss Whedon. Zack Snyder, who had been central to Warners’ DC universe having directed Man of Steel and Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice, was forced to leave the project in post-production due to a family tragedy and was replaced by Whedon. It was reported that under Whedon’s supervision, Justice League underwent a substantial change in tone and while Snyder retained the director’s credit, some have suggested that as much as 70% of the theatrical cut was either shot or re-shot by Whedon. Rumours began to circulate online that Warner Brothers possessed a near complete and vastly superior ‘Snyder Cut’ of the film, and calls to release it began to echo around certain pockets of social media. In May 2020, Warner Brothers announced that they were putting $70 million towards the restoration of Snyder’s original vision for the film, with the cut to be released on their streaming service, HBO Max.
Continue readingReview – High Ground (2020)
Director: Stephen Johnson
Starring: Jacob Junior Nayinggul, Simon Baker, Callan Mulvey, Jack Thompson, Sean Mununggurr, Caren Pistorius, Ryan Corr, Witiyana Marika, Esmerelda Marimowa
The last decade and a half has witnessed a pronounced shift in Indigenous screen narratives, moving away from traditionally hard-hitting social-realist dramas towards the embracing of genre. One of the most interesting aspects of this shift has been the embracing of the Western. Through films like Warwick Thornton’s Sweet Country and Ivan Sen’s Mystery Road,this classical genre, traditionally the site of nation-building mythologising, has been co-opted to serve as a site of cultural reckoning, negotiating the unresolved traumas of Australia’s colonialist history. While High Ground director Stephen Johnson is not himself an indigenous man, he has had a long career working with Indigenous creatives, and his long awaited sophomore film, produced by former Yothu Yindi member Witiyana Marika and made in consultation with the local Indigenous clans, continues this genre subversion.
Continue readingReview – Promising Young Woman (2020)
Director: Emerald Fennell
Starring: Carey Mulligan, Bo Burnham, Laverne Cox, Jennifer Coolidge, Clancy Brown, Alison Brie
As recent revelations of Joss Whedon’s abusive behaviour on the set of Buffy the Vampire Slayer remind us, the film and television industries have been at the centre of the #MeToo movement since it began. It therefore makes sense that the screen should become a place where these issues start to be tackled. Emerald Fennel’s dark satire Promising Young Woman subversively blends the revenge thriller with the romantic comedy to provide a searing critique of rape culture and a system that insists on giving the benefit of the doubt to boys who ‘will be boys.’ In the process, it might just have provided us with the first truly great #MeToo film.
Continue readingReview – Soul (2020)
Director: Pete Docter
Starring: Jamie Foxx, Tina Fey, Graham Norton, Rachel House, Alice Braga, Phylicia Rashad, Donnell Rawlings, Angela Bassett
In 1960, Alfred Hitchcock shocked audiences and turned narrative cinema on its head when he killed off his protagonist Marion Crane only a third of the way through Psycho. He could hardly have imagined that sixty years down the track he would be one-upped by a kids movie that manages to kill its protagonist before the opening title card. Of course, Pixar has made a habit of challenging our expectations of kids films, but perhaps more than ever before, to call Soul a kids movie at all is some combination of reductive and misleading.
Continue readingReview – Shadow in the Cloud (2020)
Director: Roseanne Liang
Starring: Chloë Grace Moretz, Beulah Koale, Taylor John Smith, Nick Robinson, Callan Mulvey, Benedict Wall, Byron Coll, Joe Witkowski
When approaching a patently absurd film like Shadow in the Cloud,rather than asking whether or not it is going be good, the better question is whether or not it is going to be the right kind of stupid. Because there is a right kind of stupid. We enjoy different films in different ways. While some want us to lean in and immerse ourselves empathetically, presenting us with believable scenarios and relatable characters, others need us to sit back and embrace the fiction. When a film with an incredible, silly premise thinks it is the former it can be tiresome and disengaging. But when it possesses the self-awareness to know it is the latter, to wink at its audience, allowing filmmakers and audience alike to embrace the absurdity, then the stupid can become sublime. It’s a balance that the Fast and Furious franchise managed to find by its fifth instalment, and one that the genre-bending Shadow in the Cloud nails instantly.
Continue readingReview – Rams (2020)
Director: Jeremy Sims
Starring: Sam Neill, Michael Caton, Miranda Richardson, Asher Keddie, Wayne Blair, Leon Ford
Who would have thought that a remake of a quirky Icelandic film about shepherds could end up being the film to best encapsulate the experience of 2020 in Australia? With Rams, a remake of Grimur Hakonarson’s 2015 film Hrútar (which is Icelandic for ‘Rams’), screenwriter Jules Duncan and director Jeremy Sims have managed to not only make the story feel organically of this place, but also very much of this time.
Continue readingReview – Tenet (2020)
Director: Christopher Nolan
Starring: John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, Kenneth Branagh, Dimple Kapadia, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Himesh Patel
Christopher Nolan has been the biggest name in blockbuster filmmaking for about a decade now. As arguably the only director in the world able to mount big budget blockbusters that aren’t based on comic books or best selling young adult novels, he is no stranger to a bold and high stakes release. However, his latest film, the temporal thriller Tenet, is seemingly the most important film of his career. Not for what it means to his trajectory but for what it means for the industry as a whole at this precarious moment in history. The Hollywood studios are caught between a rock and a hard place. Cinemas have reopened in many markets but not in others. Even where they are open, it is not known whether audiences are yet comfortable with the idea of returning to them en mass. As such we have seen studios caught in a holding pattern, sitting on their big releases unsure of the viability of releasing them into the present market. Someone had to be first to take the plunge and that was Warner Brothers. Tenet is the first legitimate blockbuster to be released into the Covid era theatrical market and will serve as a test case for whether theatrical distribution is an economically viable option for Hollywood in the immediate future. It’s an absurd weight to place on any film, particularly one as complex as Tenet.
Continue reading
Review – Onward (2020)
Director: Dan Scanlon
Starring: Tom Holland, Chris Pratt, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Octavia Spencer, Mel Rodriguez
After a recent emphasis on sequels, with Toy Story 4, Incredibles 2, Cars 3 and Finding Dory all coming out in the last four years, Pixar is returning to original storytelling with Onward. Co-written and directed by Dan Scanlon, who previously helmed Monsters University (another Pixar sequel), Onward fittingly offers escapism and adventure at a time when everyone is housebound and in dire need of distraction.
Transferring high fantasy to the present day, Onward transports us to a magical world which has lost its magic. A brief prologue describes how long ago this world had been full of wonder, adventure and, most important of all, magic. But magic was hard to master so as time passed the world turned its back on it in exchange for the convenience of science. Thus, we find the town of New Mushroomton, a sprawling suburbia much like our own, except that it is inhabited by elves, centaurs, cyclopses and pixies, and has somewhat of a feral unicorn problem. Continue reading
Review – Extraction (2020)
Director: Sam Hargrave
Starring: Chris Hemsworth, Rudhraksh Jaiswal, Randeep Hooda, Golshifteh Farahani, Priyanshu Painyuli, David Harbour
With the exception of prestige productions like Roma and The Irishman, original movies from streaming companies have tended to be viewed as the contemporary equivalent of the old straight-to-video release. But with the world’s cinemas forced the close their doors by Covid-19 and Hollywood holding back their big budget releases in the hope of being able to recoup some of their investment down the track, Netflix, Amazon and the like find themselves the only show in town. The result is that a film like Extraction, a generic actioner which sees former Marvel stunt coordinator and second unit director Sam Hargrave making his directorial debut, ends up with more eyes on it than it might have otherwise anticipated. Continue reading
Review – Little Women (2019)
Director: Greta Gerwig
Starring: Saoirse Ronan, Florence Pugh, Emma Watson, Eliza Scanlan, Timothee Chalament, Laura Dern, Meryl Streep, Chris Cooper
Before she made Lady Bird, the coming-of-age drama that put her on the map, Greta Gerwig had already written her adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Despite there already being six film adaptations of the novel, not to mention numerous television movies and mini-series, and the knowledge that no one would back an unproven director to make it, Gerwig felt that was still something vital in the story of the Marsh sisters and a 21st century audience warranted its own telling of the tale. With Lady Bird’s Oscar-nominated success giving her the chance to prove it, on both counts it appears she was correct. Continue reading
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