Tag: three star
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Modern Film: Dead Again (1991)
★★★ Filmmaking is a constantly evolving conversation in technical and aesthetics. While few films are truly avant-garde, they tend to align with the prevailing winds of the era. No-one says that you can’t make a film that feels like a 1940s film noir, directors don’t. If one looks at Hitchcock, directors like Brian De Palma…
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Remarkably Bright Creatures (2026)
★★★ Remarkably Bright Creatures is a drama about two lost people, told through the eyes of the octopus to observes them. Marcellus is a giant pacific octopus spending his final days of life in an aquarium. When his escapes get him tangled, the ageing cleaner Tova (Sally Field) saves him, and Marcellus vows to repay…
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World Film: Amphibian Man (1962)
★★★ With Australia being part of the Anglophone world, Hollywood (and to a lesser extent Britain) dominates the film landscape. While this was a bigger problem in earlier generations when the Australian content became virtually non-existent (see: Not Quite Hollywood), the idea of having a local industry is in some way a capturing of the…
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Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale (2025)
★★★ Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale hopefully the final time they flog the British period drama for what amounts to an overlong episode. If this were a Christmas special – as British television is want to do – it would be understandable as a bookend to the show, even though it had one of those…
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Honey Don’t! (2025)
★★★ Honey, Don’t is a black comedy crime thriller from Ethan Coen. Honey Donahue (Margret Qualley) is a private detective, trying to figure out why her prospective client wound up dead the day before they were due to meet. In pulling at the thread, it points to the victim’s church where the charismatic preacher (Chris…
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The Luckiest Man in America (2025)
★★★ The Luckiest Man in America is a recreation of the remarkable feat of Michael Larson (Paul Walter Hauser) when he became the highest ever game show winner on Press Your Luck in 1984. He travels to Hollywood to get on the game show, with the producer feeling sorry for him and admiring his every-man…
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War Machine (2026)
★★★ War Machine is an Australian science fiction action film that feels like Predator mixed with Pacific Rim. Here, a soldier (Alan Ritchson) wounded in Afghanistan seeks redemption for failing to save his brother by fulfilling his brother’s dream to be a ranger. Undergoing the final challenge to be a ranger throws up an unexpected…
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Primitive War (2025)
★★★ Primitive War is an Australian science fiction mission story of a group of G.I.s sent on a classified mission in the Vietnam jungle. It seems the Russians are up to something, and a group of green berets has gone missing trying to figure out what, so a retrieval team made up of military misfits…
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Rewatch: Twins (1988)
★★★ The historical narrative painted by Peter Biskind in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls was that the 70s was the time in Hollywood driven by directors, while the 80s was a push-back on that by producers taking back control. In the book, he talks about Jaws and Star Wars showing a formula for the multiplex era,…
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The Housemaid (2025)
★★★ The Housemaid is a psychological thriller. It follows Millie (Sydney Sweeney) who lies her way into what seems like a dream gig as a housemaid. Only the mother (Amanda Seyfried) is happy to play mind games with her by accusing her of all sorts of things she didn’t do. It all comes to a…
A Random Walk Through Film History 