Features

'The Thing' (1982) - A Retrospective on the Weird Fiction Genre in Cinema

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’.

Reviews

'Unsane' - Review

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.

Reviews

'Abracadabra' – Review

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).

Reviews

Revisiting 'Grabbers' (2012) – Comedy and Horror in Good Proportions

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.

Reviews

'The Divine Order' – Review

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.

Reviews

'Red Sparrow' – Review

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.

Reviews

'Rock’n Roll' – Review

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.

Reviews

'The Ritual' – Netflix Original Review

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).