Iranian director Asghar Farhadi is one of the great auteurs of contemporary cinema. His distinctly low-key humanist dramas immerse us in the minutiae of Iranian people’s lives and through their stories he subtly but powerfully explores aspects of Iranian society, culture and politics. His latest film, the Cannes Film Festival Grand Prix winner, A Hero, is no different and has
Read moreJurassic Park was one of the event films of the 1990s and a movie many would recall as fondly as ET or Star Wars. Based on the excellent Michael Crichton novel, the film combined revelatory photorealistic dinosaur special effects with a mostly exciting, if at times, cheesy adventure story built around revolutionary science and technology concepts. Although not as rigorously
Read moreBenediction, the latest film from revered English director Terence Davies (Distant Voices, Still Lives) intelligently and movingly dramatizes the life of famed poet, Siegfried Sassoon. The film depicts Sassoon as an artist who, despite objecting to Britain’s continued participation in the First World War and to entrenched British values, was celebrated by British high society. The film also reveals his
Read moreMothering Sunday, which comes from director Eva Husson and is based on the Graham Swift novel, explores torrid passions lurking beneath the surface of rigid manners in the British upper class in the early 20th century. The film focuses on young maid, Jane Fairchild (Australian actress Odessa Young) who works in the sterile and often tense household of the Nivens,
Read moreArriving on our cinema screens a mere 36 years after the original film, Top Gun: Maverick is part action movie, part military propaganda and part romance but more than anything it’s a wilful exercise in Gen X nostalgia mining. With flashbacks to the original film, scenes almost reproduced from that film, a soundtrack with some of the same songs and
Read moreThe new Australian film The Drover’s Wife: The Legend of Molly Johnson is very loosely based on a Henry Lawson short story from 1892. Those seeing this film with a vague recollection of the original story, who may be expecting a quaint Australian folktale, are in for a shock… but a necessary one. This revisionist Australian western, which explores issues
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