(via Shutterstock) My happy place, well one of them anyway, is a cinema where for anyone between 1.5 hours and god knows how long – overlong blockbusters I am looking at you – I can forget the world outside and lose myself in some cinematic magic. It’s a bliss and Continue Reading
Movies
Movie review: Jurassic World: Rebirth
(courtesy IMP Awards) It will come as exactly no surprise to anyone that life is hard. Very hard, in fact. Oh, we dress it up in all sorts of diversionary bells and whistles, and even manage to have some fun along the way but enjoyable though it is to be Continue Reading
Movie review: The Quiet Maid (Calladita)
(courtesy IMDb) This may be news to the producers of many a Hollywood blockbuster – this reviewer loves many of them but subtle they are not – but there is real power in telling an emotionally impactful story quietly. While the temptation, especially in our cliffhanger-addicted, streaming algorithm modern digital Continue Reading
He’s gone too far! Trailer releases for a feisty and fun Cat in the Hat movie
(courtesy IMP Awards) SNAPSHOT“Today is going to be THE. BEST. DAY. EVER!” Meet the Cat in the Hat you don’t know! In the whimsical tradition of Dr. Seuss, The Cat in the Hat comes to the big screen in his animated theatrical feature film debut, an all-new, epic adventure with Continue Reading
One last roll of the planetary dice … Project Hail Mary releases its first gripping trailer
(courtesy IMP Awards) SNAPSHOTAstronaut Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) awakens with no memory of himself or his mission. He deduces he is the sole survivor of a crew sent to the Tau Ceti solar system in search of a solution to a catastrophic event on Earth. In his search for answers, Grace must Continue Reading
Movie review: Flow
(courtesy IMP Awards) It’s a rare thing indeed to emerge from watching a movie of any kind and feel both soothed and euphoric. Surely the two states are antithetical, with the more active one bludgeoning the other into emotional oblivion with boundlessly energetic vivacity? Or the former chilling you the Continue Reading
Breaking free: How Jim Henson and his team made the Muppets magic happen
(courtesy Muppet Wiki / (c) The Jim Henson Company / Disney) SNAPSHOTThe illusions that have baffled me for years is when muppets go outside when they seem to break free from their puppeteers and become little sentient creatures….These movies were released before CGI was ubiquitous. These are in-camera effects. What Continue Reading
Want to borrow some nostalgia? Head on over to Video Heaven
(courtesy First Showing) SNAPSHOTFor some thirty years, from the 1980s until their decline in the 2010s, video shops were crucial arenas for film culture – and both highbrow and lowbrow American cinema has documented their rise, fall and changing meanings. Alex Ross Perry’s Videoheaven, a labour of love ten years Continue Reading
#SydFilmFest movie review: The Ballad of Wallis Island
(courtesy IMP awards) A mistake often made is that for something to have real emotional power, an impact that rends the heart and sears the soul, that it must be big, bombastic and loud. But while there are more than enough movies that mistakes neon sign-cloaked, well-telegraphed emotional touchpoints, clumsily Continue Reading
Movie review: Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (MI:8)
(courtesy IMP Awards) If you have seen more than you fair share of blockbusters, and the odds are if you’re a dedicated popcorn-chomping moviegoer that you have, you will be well acquainted with their propensity to go BIG, go epic and go bonkers bananas with barely a moment of hesitation. Continue Reading