Billy (Xavier Samuel) and Lucy (Morgan Griifn) are close friends who have grown up together in a small country town. They are a pair of ute muster champs. One day, Billy pulls a particularly hare-brained stunt and as a result, Lucy decides it’s time to break up the team and head for Sydney. This is the last thing Billy wants, but since he and Lucy have a “will-they-won’t-they” relationship, he nee...
On January 15th 2009, US Airways Flight 1549 took off from LaGuardia Airport. In less three minutes, the plane hit a flock of geese, resulting in multiple birdstrikes on the engines, which ceased to function. The pilot, Chesley Sullenberger and his first officer Jeffrey Skiles, managed to glide the Airbus A320 onto the freezing Hudson River for a textbook water landing. Passengers and crew exited ...
Greta Driscoll is 14-years-old. Her family have recently moved into their new Adelaide home. Her mother, father and older sister appear to be settling in well, but life feels harder for Greta (Bethany Whitmore). She hasn’t made any friends at her new school, apart from weird, nerdy Elliott (Harrison Feldman) and she is doing everything she can to avoid the attentions of mean girl sisters, the trip...
Robert Mazur is a US Customs special agent. He regularly goes under cover to make drug stings. When we first see him, Mazur (Bryan Cranston) is in the middle of a bust. There’s trouble, but his professionalism carries the day. He wraps up the case and destroys his fake IDs as a kind of end ritual. He’s proud of the work he does, but he is glad to leave his sketchy undercover persona behind, so he ...
John Link (Mel Gibson) is an ex-con making his way as a tattooist working from a worn-out old trailer in a small town in the California Desert. His neighbours are mostly loner men living out their existence far from the pressures and expectations of city life. John’s closest friend is Kirby, (William H. Macy) his AA sponsor and a man well-accustomed to dealing with Link’s moody personality. One da...
December 11, 2005. In the seaside suburb of Cronulla, there’s a race riot on the beach. White Aussies versus Lebanese. Australia is shocked. Politicians and the media rush to condemn the violence. This is not how Australia is supposed to be, is the general consensus. It is the day after the riot and as it says in the publicity, “two carloads of hotheads from either side are destined to collide”. T...
David Packouz (Miles Teller) is a young Miamian who is college educated and yet has found employment difficult to hold on to. He is now a massage therapist. It is 2005 and he admits in the brief and painless opening narration, that he is lost. He meets up with an old high school friend, Ephraim Diveroli (Jonah Hill). He quickly discovers that Ephraim, by contrast, has a very strong sense of direct...
Amy (Mila Kunis) is the mother of two and the part-time sales executive at a hipster coffee company. Her marriage to Mike (Brad Walton) has seen better days and because she is always multi-tasking for three other people, she is never on time for her job, nor any of her kids’ many extra-curricular activities. To make matters worse, at her children’s school, she runs into numerous problems wit...
DEMOLITION was the opening night film of the Revelation Perth International Film Festival 2016. Director Jean-Marc Vallee’s best-known feature to date is the Oscar award-winning DALLAS BUYERS CLUB (2015). Investment banker Davis Mitchell (Jake Gyllenhaal) is being driven to work by his wife Julia (Heather Lind) when they are involved in a car accident that kills her. (This happens approximately tw...
Iconic German filmmaker Werner Herzog has directed QUEEN OF THE DESERT, a film about English explorer, writer, spy and archeologist Gertrude Bell. Australia’s own Nicole Kidman assays the lead role. Before digging into the movie itself, it may be useful to know more about the historical Bell. She was born in 1868. Her family was wealthy and influential. Unusually for the era, she was educated at O...
The first NOW YOU SEE ME was a globetrotting, jet-setting heist movie that kept its audience off-kilter with a series of plot twists ending with a big one that I will not reveal here, even though you’ve had three years to discover it. The movie relied on splashy visuals, clever set pieces and the charm and chemistry of its cast. It established the idea of a mystic society called The Eye dating bac...
Tim Burton’s and Disney’s ALICE IN WONDERLAND (2010) now has a sequel, ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS, this time directed by James Bobin of THE MUPPETS (2011) and television’s Flight of the Conchords. When we left Alice (Mia Wasikowska) in the first picture, she was about to jump aboard her father’s ship,The Wonder, and embark on a colonialist adventure in the Far East. ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING ...
