THE WATER DIVINER is a drama about Australian Joshua Connor (Russell Crowe) who farms in the Mallee, Victoria in the early years of the 20th century. Joshua is married to Eliza (Jacqueline McKenzie) and they have three sons. Their property is dry, but Joshua has some skills in divining the location of water. As he explains later in the story, he doesn’t always get it right, sometimes he digs a dry...
ANNIE, the feature film adapted from the 1977 Broadway musical, which in turn is an adaptation of the Great Depression-era comic strip Little Orphan Annie, is a film with a lot of cultural baggage. The kind of baggage that you just don’t want to be lifting today in your post-Yuletide haze. So setting aside the remake and adaptation bizzo for a few paragraphs, what is 2014 post GFC-era ANNIE about?...
Hiro Hamada is a fourteen-year-old boy who lives in San Fransokyo. Hiro loves robot fighting and has created a brilliant microbot that can do great damage to much larger ‘bots. Hiro’s prowess with robotics is shared by his older brother Tadashi. He hates seeing the younger Hamada wasting his time gambling on robot fights and persuades his sibling to apply to the university where Tadashi is studyin...
Maggie (Melissa McCarthy), a newly single mother, tries to raise her eleven-year-old son Oliver (Jaeden Lieberher) in a new neighbourhood, however her job as a CAT Scan technician means she often has to work late. Reluctantly, she turns to her neighbour for help, Vince MacKenna (Bill Murray), a down-at-heel veteran of the Vietnam War. Vince agrees to become the baby sitter strictly for the money a...
In 2009, the work of street photographer Vivian Maier began to show up online. The images were scanned from negatives that were in the possession of Chicago collector John Maloof. He came across Maier’s work by chance. He bought some trunks and boxes at a deceased estate sale. When he properly examined what he had bought, he discovered thousands of negatives and hundreds of rolls of undeveloped fi...
MEN, WOMEN & CHILDREN is set in Austin, Texas, and tells the intersecting stories of a group of parents and their teenage children. The adults feel separated from their kids, the kids mostly ignore their parents and try to make connections with each other on-line or via their ‘phones. The adults feel disconnected from each other, too. Unable to maintain an intimate relationship, some look for ...
When we first meet Lou Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal) we learn quickly that he is a scavenger and a liar. He is also a positive thinker with a level of self-belief that seems ridiculous given his shabby vehicle and lack of employment. Lou lives in Los Angeles; his go-getter personality, his use of business jargon and self-help buzz-words, hardly make him unique in this environment. A “hustler̶...
In Brooklyn, there is a series of “drop bars” where the illegal money from criminal jobs can be left. The person running the bar doesn’t know how much money is in these secret hidey-holes. Their job is to look the other way and say nothing while the money comes in. Later, someone from higher up the food chain arrives and clears out the drop-literally a makeshift safe of some kind-and eventually th...
KILL THE MESSENGER is a feature film based on the investigative journalism of the late Gary Webb. The facts, although disputed by some, are on record. This review will mention some of these in the following paragraphs, so if you want to see this film untainted by historical information, then you’d best walk away from your screen now. Take with you the thought that this movie is aimed at an audienc...
Hector (Simon Pegg) is a successful London psychiatrist whose life seems good, until the day he realises that he is deeply unhappy. He feels like a fraud who doesn’t have the life experience to help his patients. So he decides to help them and himself by taking a journey around the world to search for happiness. What makes others happy? he wonders. Leaving his practice for a while isn’t as diffic...
There are plenty of movies that tell the story of a funeral bringing together a family. In recent weeks, both THE JUDGE and WISH I WAS HERE have touched upon this common trope. Funerals gather people who in some cases haven’t seen each other for years. In the movies, and possibly in life, this is an opportunity to settle scores and to complete unfinished business. Whether it’s an arthouse flick or...
A young clerk-typist called Norman (Logan Lerman) joins a Sherman tank crew, replacing one of the gunners, recently killed. In fact, Norman’s first task is to wash out the remains of his predecessor from the seat he will occupy on the tank. It is April 1945. The Allied forces have pushed all the way into Germany. Norman is part of the 66th Armor Regiment, 2nd Armored Division. There are five men i...
