Phil Jeng Kane

Dalton Trumbo originally intended to be a novelist, he wrote several books, including the award-winning Johnny Got His Gun (1939). However his day-job was Hollywood screenwriter and he was able to command top fees for his screenplays. In the late 1940s, he was working at the highest level of the movie business. And then he was named as a Communist sympathizer. Eventually, he was called before Cong...

SPOTLIGHT is a well-made, almost old-fashioned film. The subject that is at the heart of the story is serious and current. The craftsmanlike approach to the film-making and the mature approach to the story-telling feels like a throwback to twenty or thirty years ago. If someone had told me the movie was the creation of a rejuvenated Ron Howard, I could believe it. The actual director of SPOTLIGHT ...

The premise of the movie SISTERS is simple. Maura Ellis (Amy Poehler) and her sister Kate (Tina Fey) are asked to return to their family home in Orlando, Florida. Their parents (Dianne Wiest and James Brolin) have sold the house and they want their daughters to remove the childhood and adolescent junk from their old bedrooms. None of this news makes the sisters happy. Neither is ready for their fa...

Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a fur trapper in 1823 Wyoming. He is one of a party of trappers making their way through the frozen hinterland. He travels with his son Hawk (Forrest Goodluck) and is protective of the boy because Hawk is half Pawnee.  Glass’s connection to the Pawnee puts him under suspicion in the mind of Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy); a ruthless man who seeks personal gain in any situ...

JOY, the latest movie collaboration of Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper and director David O. Russell, seems at first, to be about Joy Mangano, the woman who invented the Miracle Mop. During the process of making the movie, the director explained to Mangano that it would be half-fictional. A quick investigation of her biography on the Internets proves this to be so. This is the sort of thing film...

Real-life American writer Bill Bryson (Redford) is enjoying a settled existence in New Hampshire. He lives there with his English wife Catherine (Emma Thompson) his children and his grand-children. Something, possibly the death of a colleague, leads to his decision to walk the Appalachian Trail. The AT as it is known to many, is 2,180 miles (3500 kilometres) in length, it crosses 14 states and str...

HOLDING THE MAN is based on a popular book and a well-received stage play. Now Tim Conigrave’s 1995 memoir has been adapted into a feature film. The film is a dramatised telling of his fifteen year relationship with John Caleo. They met in the 1970s when they were students at a Catholic boys’ school in Melbourne. After high school, John studied to be a chiropractor. Tim became an actor. Their rela...

THE THIRD MAN is a thriller made in 1949. The film is the best known example of British noir. It doesn’t deal with crime in any of the expected ways. Instead, it is set and shot in post-war Vienna and carries with it the impact of being based in the reality of the time. It doesn’t have the documentary feel of Rossellini’s ROME, OPEN CITY made at the very end of the war, yet the premise and the imm...

IRIS is the new documentary from celebrated filmmaker Albert Maysles who is best known for his work on GIMME SHELTER (1970) and GREY GARDENS (1975). The Iris of the title is Iris Apfel, a 94-year-old New Yorker and style icon. The film gives us access to her apartments in New York and Florida and to her day-to-day existence with her husband Carl. Iris and Carl live in managed clutter. Their homes ...

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional detective Sherlock Holmes has been interpreted in a myriad of ways. According to our friend the Internet, the character has been played by 75 actors in 211 movies. The latest incarnation is something rare, an ageing Holmes (Ian McKellen), unaccompanied by Doctor John Watson. It is 1947 and his detecting days are thirty years in the past. He spends most his time i...

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: ROGUE NATION is the fifth installment of the shape-shifting extravaganza that is the Impossible Missions Franchise.  By now, we in the audience know to expect a death-defying set-piece stunt, shiny tech, exotic locations, mid-level laffs from the likes of Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames and a galloping plot that involves chasing a missile, microchips or money. The desired object doe...