Reviews

Review: John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023)

In the end, it’s all about death. Most action movies are, really. The threat of death — or the implied threat of death — is the fuel that powers the action engine, even though we’re complicit with the films...

Review: Avatar: the Way of Water (2022)

To cut a long story short, twelve years after the events of Avatar, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), now permanently in his part-Na’vi Avatar body, his Na’vi wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), and their passel of k...

Review: The Wandering Earth 2 (2023)

2019’s The Wandering Earth is a banger. Directed by Frant Gwo and adapted from a short story by literary luminary Liu Cixin (The Three-Body Problem), it’s a wildly ambitious Chinese sci-fi epic whose...

Review: You Can Go Now (2023)

“I’m an activist masquerading as an artist,” Kamilaroi, Kooma, Jiman, and Gurang Gurang man Richard Bell likes to say, which is an attitude I respect. Bell, whose work was recently the subject of a massive car...

Review: Black Snow (2022)

Outback noir is the Australian prestige TV genre du jour right now, the fecund subgenre giving us the likes of Mystery Road: Origin, Savage River, True Colours and Troppo all in t...

Review: Blueback (2022)

Western Australian author Tim Winton has a big cultural footprint. The ocean-loving chronicler of maturing masculinity is literally a Living National Treasure, having been declared one by the National Tru...

Review: Irreverent (2022)

After a peace talk he’s mediated goes bloodily wrong, Mafia fixer Paulo (Colin Donnell) finds himself on the run with a large chunk of illicit cash, a bullet wound in his shoulder, and the potentially terminal...

Review: Poker Face (2022)

Let’s get the poker pun out of the way first. There have been plenty of column inches lately devoted to the story that Russell Crowe went all-in on his second directorial effort, Poker Face. He took over the r...