The wildly hedonistic Berlin club culture is celebrated in a new documentary, focusing on the lives of three of its most famous bouncers. Barry Healy reviews the film.
film review
Isabelle Huppert comes to rule the Parisian hashish trade in this comedy/drama that demonstrates the casual violence of the French police, writes Barry Healy.
Barry Healy reviews 2067, a thriller set in an unnamed Australian city, racked by climate change and where oxygen must be bought from a huge corporation.
Barry Healy reviews One Night in Miami, which tells a story of boxing champion Muhammad Ali's 1964 meeting with Malcolm X, soul singer Sam Cooke and footballer Jim Brown.
Santiago Rising takes viewers to the streets of Chile’s capital city as the 2019-20 protests unfolded, introducing them to the social movements, protesters and people behind the rebellion, writes Federico Fuentes.
Chasing the Present focuses on the psychological and spiritual journey of a successful young New York businessperson who finds himself at a mental crossroads, beset by panic attacks while advancing a successful career, writes Barry Healy.
Yesterday is a family-friendly rom-com that satisfyingly reaches a heart-warming and highly ethical conclusion. It is almost ridiculously wholesome, writes Tracy Sorensen.
Red Joan
Starring Judi Dench, Sophie Cookson, Tom Hughes & Tereza Srbova
Directed by Trevor Nunn
In cinemas
Red Joan is loosely based on the spying activities of British civil servant Melita Norwood, who was nearly 90 years old when she was exposed as a Soviet agent.
Two new documentaries that screened at the recent Sydney Film Festival shine a light, in contrasting but powerful styles, on an important, yet often neglected story in the refugee narrative — why people seek asylum.
Despite his great CV, Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin doesn’t quite reach its satirical pretensions.
This year is the 50th anniversary of 1968, the year when revolutionary upsurges occurred all across the globe.
Before touching down on the planet of Canto Bight, Rose looks down forebodingly to tell us that it’s full of the “worst people in the galaxy”. Cut to champagne glasses clinking and a casino full of galactic 1-percenters.
“Only one business in the galaxy can get you this rich,” Rose — a new character in Star Wars: The Last Jedi, a mechanic on the Rebel flagship — explains to returning hero Finn as they look around the beachfront resort planet, “selling weapons to the First Order.” She goes on to tell her family’s history: forced to work on a First Order mining colony before it was bled out and blitzed for weapons testing.
The latest film about former British PM Winston Churchill, Darkest Hour, is already being tipped for the Oscars, with Gary Oldman’s portrayal of Churchill at the helm of speculation.
Oldman’s performance is indeed brilliant, but let us be clear. While it is a great piece of cinema that, artistically speaking, deserves many awards, it is also a film that glorifies a certifiably vile man.
Margaret Atwood is blessed and/or cursed with the credit for this year’s go-to feminist analogy. Any time an old white man makes it clear that women are best kept silent and pregnant, someone says that it’s “just like The Handmaid’s Tale”.
Cyril Lionel Robert James, best known as CLR James, was a Trinidadian-born, Black socialist whose work spanned many of the great struggles of the 20th century and across many continents.
A life-long anti-Stalinist, he died in 1989 just as the Soviet Union was beginning to break up – something that brought him joy.
Now his remarkable life has been captured in a new documentary Every Cook Can Govern.
