6/10
The War with Grandpa Review
The War with Grandpa was a book written in 1984 by Robert Kimmel Smith. It was aimed specifically at children and has been studied and written about by a couple of generations of American school-kids. Like any work that has become the fodder for enforced reports, this book is loathed by some. However, Accessreel has been researching the matter for at least two days and we can confirm that generall...
Below Review
Sometimes a movie comes along that defies your ability to categorise it simply or quickly. About fifteen minutes into the new feature film BELOW, I knew this would be the case. By the end, I had seen many things, but still wasn’t sure how to describe the world that had unfolded in this Western Australian film directed by Maziar Lahooti. This is when every reviewer, turns to the Press Kit. It had t...
Storm Boy Review
South Australian author Colin Thiele published his popular children’s novel Storm Boy in 1964. Since then, it has been made into an audio dramatisation, a stage play and a 1976 award-winning feature film. Now it has been adapted to film for a second time. There is definitely something about this fifty-year-old tale that attracts reimagining and retelling. The story at the centre is set somewhere i...
Bad Girl Review
Amy (Sara West) is a seventeen-year-old with a troubled history. She has been in trouble, in and out of various schools and now finds herself on thin ice with her adoptive parents, particularly her father. The family move to regional Western Australia for a change of scenery and to isolate Amy from the bad influences in her life. She quickly befriends local girl Chloe (Samara Weaving). She seems l...
The Neon Demon Review
Jesse (Elle Fanning) is recently arrived in Los Angeles. She is sixteen-years-old and aspires to be a model. Her agent Roberta (Christina Hendricks) advises her to say she is nineteen in order to work. Roberta arranges a test with an A-list fashion photographer and from there, Jesse’s star begins to rise. THE NEON DEMON is Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn’s latest film. He has been making feat...
Where to Invade Next Review
Michael Moore the filmmaker and political activist is back with a new feature, WHERE TO INVADE NEXT. Moore’s fictional premise is that he has been approached by America’s Joint Chiefs of Staff to work out why their nation hasn’t won a war since WW2. He takes it upon himself to travel across the world “invading” countries and “stealing” their best ideas to take them back the US. In practice, he vis...
The Water Diviner Review
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...
Rampart Review
Set in 1999 Los Angeles, veteran police officer Dave Brown, the last of the renegade cops, works to take care of his family, and struggles for his own survival. Because you and I are culturally savvy and get our information from Wikipedia, we know that the new movie RAMPART, starring Woody Harrelson, is named for the Rampart scandal that rocked the LAPD in the late 1990s. Knowing this, you might t...