With the growing critical reception around Annihilation (2018), based on the Jeff VanderMeer novel, and other recent semi-surrealist triumphs like David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) and Del Toro’s The Shape of Water (2017) – a surge of interest in the weird fiction genre is happening, which some critics have even dubbed ‘A Weird Renaissance’.
Fans of the Godzilla franchise who are eagerly awaiting the latest installment in 2019 will be excited about the rumours surrounding the gold, three headed icon King Ghidorah, who is set to make a come back.
You know that feeling when you go to the cinema by yourself? There’s a group in the row behind gossiping mindlessly. You had arranged to meet someone, who cancelled, now you are alone. The empty seats beside you take on a further quality of distance and isolation. The whispering voices of others synchronise with your own subconscious fears. Then the film starts.
Abracadabra is screening as part of the 21st Spanish Film Festival in Australia, which is looking to be a fantastic event, with a variety of interesting films to showcase, an opening night gala and afterparty with Torres wines, tapas and live entertainment, and closing with Oscar winner Guillermo Del Toro’s Spanish masterpiece, Pan’s Labyrinth (2006).
Rampage is undoubtedly the most idiotic film of the century. But…
In the junkyard of films you’ve already watched, and the backlog of recommendations one never seems to have time to sift through, some movies seem to rise from the wasteland with the more time that passes, and they cement themselves as monolithic precedents of the best of the genre – one such film is 2012’s horror-comedy, Grabbers.
Pacific Rim Uprising is a surprisingly competent sequel to what is essentially an over intellectualised apocalyptic ‘robot versus monsters’ movie.
Petra Biondina Volpe’s The Divine Order is a converstation starter, and a film with a touching sentiment at its core, but it leaves a lot of open questions and evokes the uneasiness of modern identity politics, by shying away from the complexities of our own age.
With imagery as powerful and as alarming as Pink Floyd’s film The Wall (1982), the trailer for Fahrenheit 451 is a breath of fresh air, in a climate of political staleness in contemporary film.
Red Sparrow carries the femme fatale spy thriller back to its cinematic heyday, thematically mirroring 1940’s film noir, but it is undoubtedly Jennifer Lawrence’s acting prowess as the titular vixen that steals the show.
The 2018 French Film Festival premieres in Melbourne this week, and I caught a preview of Rock’n Roll, the latest film from French actor, director and screenwriter Guillaume Canet.
Netflix recently dropped The Ritual – a suave British horror movie which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. The film represents a sophistication in style for modern horror, with it’s True-Detective-deer-stag-horn, Blair-Witch-sticks, Wicker-Man aesthetic, and just a dash of Yellow Brick Road (2010).