Bring Him to Me ★★½ AUSTRALIAN director Luke Sparke is heading in the right direction. His fifth film, crime drama Bring Him to Me, is probably his most accomplished to date, based on my viewing of two previous efforts and other critic responses. It managed to snare American actor Barry […]

Sparke on right path

The Marvels ★★ IF YOU’RE not up with the Marvel Universe overall, including some of the television series, you can forget about the 33rd film, The Marvels, making much sense. Granted it’s partly on me that I can barely recall the plot of 2019’s Captain Marvel and haven’t seen the […]

MCU #33 far from Marvellous

The Family Plan ★★★½ AMERICAN action comedy The Family Plan does exactly what it says on the cover. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel in any particular way, shape or form. But what it does, it does very well, providing an entertaining and amusing family-friendly film. Even though it could be […]

Comedy goes according to plan

River Wild ★★★ THE 1994 film The River Wild is probably best known for casting Meryl Streep as the lead in an action thriller. In that film she had to contend with two of the participants on her rafting trip who turn out to be armed criminals. It was an […]

Ride the wild river…again

Leave the World Behind ★★★½ THE creator of television series Mr Robot, Sam Esmail, knows how to spin an engrossing yarn. His second feature, Leave the World Behind, is also a high-concept drama but with even higher stakes at play. Immediately there is an unusualness to the music score that […]

Friends until the bitter end

Rumble Through the Dark ★★★ AARON Eckhart exercises his acting chops as bare knuckle fighter Jack ‘The Butcher’ Bouche in the southern noir drama Rumble Through The Dark. He plays a psychologically tortured alcoholic trying to gain some semblance of self-respect by getting enough money together to stop the foreclosure on […]

Get ready to Rumble

Heat ★★★★½ MICHAEL Mann is one of my favourite film-makers. It’s a long list – maybe 20 – but, despite making only a dozen or so films, Mann is in there. His best is arguably the 1995 crime thriller Heat starring acting titans Robert de Niro and Al Pacino. The […]

Mann brings the Heat

OF 168 films watched for the first time in 2023, these were my Top 20 of the year (in no particular order) either released in Perth cinemas or home streaming: Holy Spider Poor Things Killers of the Flower Moon Oppenheimer Beau is Afraid Saltburn John Wick Chapter 4 The Whale […]

Top 20 of 2023

Poor Things ★★★★ IT’S as if Yorgos Lanthimos saw Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and thought to himself “Yes, but what if she had also been created by Doctor Frankenstein.“ Following The Killing of a Scared Deer, The Lobster and the Oscar-winning The Favourite, the eclectic Greek director has outdone himself with […]

Poor Things rich in vision and story-telling

Edge of Tomorrow ★★★½ IN BETWEEN their Mission Impossible franchise, Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie tackled Japanese sci-fi in 2014. The film was Edge of Tomorrow, also known as Live Die Repeat, with a story adapted from Japanese novel All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka. The result isn’t […]

MI team tackle Japanese sci-fi

Silent Night ★★½ ACTION thriller Silent Night is one of the disappointments of the 2023 film year. It’s not a bad movie, but action fans still expect much more from veteran Hong Kong director John Woo. Now that I have chosen not to watch most film trailers, I didn’t realise […]

Silence isn’t always golden

Master Gardener ★★★½ WHAT do Joel Edgerton, Ethan Hawke, Oscar Isaacs, George C. Scott and Robert De Niro have in common? All have played powerful and complex characters created for the screen by American writer and director Paul Schrader. Australian Edgerton is the latest in Master Gardener, the third film […]

Joel joins list of tortured souls