Legend has it that there’s a telepathic connection between twins, so when in Julia’s Eyes the titular Julia experiences a choking sensation, she knows something’s wrong with her sister Sara. She’s right — Sara is dead, hanged from a rope in her basement. The signs all point to suicide, at least as far as the…
2009’s The Loved Ones is a delirious Australian mash-up of various movies, including Carrie, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and Prom Night. Several critics have also dubbed the film as “Pretty in Pink meets Wolf Creek“, and that’s another fairly accurate analogy of this frightening yet resonant exercise in genre dramatics — it represents an…
Why do so many documentary filmmakers decide to make films about relatives or people they know? The obvious answer is the ease of getting information. But that does not explain why they choose the subjects they choose. Andrew Neel’s portrait of his grandmother, Alice Neel, at least has the benefit of being a profile of…
At first glance, Tomorrow, When the War Began — the filmic adaptation of the hugely popular teen fiction novel by John Marsden — appears to be a cheap Australian amalgam of Red Dawn and The Breakfast Club. Despite these superficial observations, this directorial debut for Stuart Beattie is a thrilling character-driven action-adventure film, and a…
Back in 1981, Peter Weir’s acclaimed motion picture Gallipoli asserted Australia’s cultural independence from Britain by portraying Aussie soldiers as heroic, anti-authoritarian and noble. Additionally, the film displayed to the world just how big a part the Aussies played in WWI and how tremendous their sacrifice was, while also damning the way the Australians were…
Kenneth (though he prefers to be referred to as ‘Kay’) is a comical, patois-speaking white guy who sucks his thumb during deep sleep, calls his seven year old sister ‘rude girl’, and asks his pet hamster, “What’s up, blood” when entering his room. He’s also a wannabe bad boy who leaves his job and vows…
Lee Chang-dong’s Poetry resembles much of what is great about the current cinema coming out of South Korea — for my money, some of the best in the world. With recent films like Oldboy, The Host, Mother and The Good, the Bad, the Weird, South Koreans have proven time after time that genre filmmaking can…
