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: Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023)
Back in the day when the world was young and fantasy as a genre wasn’t particularly well-respected, fans took what they could get. Certainly, you’d see the occasional gem like Conan the Barbarian ...
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: Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre (2023)
It’s always a coin flip with Guy Ritchie. You might get Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, or you might get Revolver. Sometimes you get Snatch, sometimes you get Swept Away (but not...
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...