Andrew Niccol has run out of great ideas. From the Philip K. Dick assisted The Truman Show (1998) to his own projects as director, including the clinical Gattaca (1997) and the underrated S1m0ne (2002) in which he glimpsed a future Hollywood where the real stars are hologramic projections, Niccol’s mind has been fertile ground for […]
An eighty year old man pierces the New York throng on his pushbike, only pausing to take snaps of the latest in fashion: what is this, Portrait of a Fetishist in his declining years? An oddball begging for loose change in exchange for a fleeting photographic memory? Neither, it turns out this is Bill Cunningham,
An early figure from the career of Nick Cave and his seminal band, The Birthday Party, guitarist Rowland S. Howard would later leave his own mark on the local music scene. Beginning in the wild days of Melbourne pub rock of the 1970’s with Cave and their earliest collaborators, Autoluminescent delves into the promising beginnings,
For the love of things that go bump in the night, a trifecta of spooky home videos has now been assembled with the arrival of a third Paranormal Activity instalment. A former teenager in love with films like Poltergeist (1982) and The Entity (1982), I’m now predisposed, it seems, to looking favourably upon films about
In a not too distant future, robots have replaced humans in the boxing ring. For these impending incarnations of ourselves, the battering of skin and bone has become a little too mundane, apparently. Instead, a form of fantasy boxing has emerged, indulging far more elaborate fancies of large-scale destruction as mindless entertainment. Charlie Kenton (Hugh
A highly entertaining slacker comedy that utilises rotoscope animation over live action footage to aesthetically pleasurable effect, Geoff Marslett’s Mars (2010) is the kind of film you can’t help falling a little in love with. Gently subversive in offhand, innocuous ways, it has fun parodying aspects of sci-fi and pop culture whilst never losing sight
Moviegoers who fondly remember Agnieszka Holland’s lovingly crafted 1993 version of the classic children’s story The Secret Garden will be disappointed to learn that Back to the Secret Garden is not the sequel. Rather, it’s the sequel to a 1987 version of the same story, only this one was produced as a “Hallmark Hall of
When gifted with a chance to view thousands of hours of previously unreleased NASA footage from nine manned flights to the moon between December 1968 and November 1972, director Al Reinert’s approach was to orchestrate a composite viewpoint for his intended documentary. For All Mankind (1989) then, at 80 minutes, is a commendably disciplined abbreviation
George Clooney’s lone directorial blunder, Leatherheads (2008), is now long forgotten. With his latest, The Ides of March, he completes a trio of impressive films, beginning with Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002) and continuing with the exemplary Good Night, and Good Luck (2005). With occasional writer partner Grant Heslov at his side, Clooney has
In 2009, despite serious misgivings, filmmaker Tony Krawitz decided to venture onto Palm Island, off the Queensland coast, with a mission to reverse a coin of common perception to tell the lesser known side of a tragic story that began on November 19, 2004. On an ordinary day, a drunken Aboriginal man, Cameron Doomadgee, was
