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

Head Count ★★ CREDIT to Australians Ben and Jacob Burkhart for making a neo-noir western. But unfortunately their debut feature Head Count isn’t that interesting. It starts in good fashion with a man on his knees with a gun at his head. It’s his own weapon and he starts trying […]

Click, click, click…

Dog Soldiers ★★★★ BEFORE he lost his way in Hollywood, Neil Marshall made three terrifically exciting films – Dog Soldiers in 2002, The Descent (2005) and Doomsday (2008). The English director’s first feature, Dog Soldiers, was released the same year as 28 Days Later which rightly garnered most of the […]

Who let the werewolves out

Retribution ★★½ GOOD news – Liam Neeson is in a good film. Bad news – it’s not the one I’m reviewing. In the Land of Saints and Sinners is an Irish crime drama coming in early 2024. I didn’t get to see it during the recent British Film Festival in […]

A good Neeson film (not this one) is coming

The Marsh King’s Daughter ★★★ WE haven’t seen “full Mendo” for a while. So, it’s great to have Ben Mendelsohn playing the bad guy in the film adaptation of The Marsh King’s Daughter. I’m not going to tell you much of the story here because there is an interesting twist […]

Daisy gets the full Mendo