Paradise Beach  ★★★ IF YOU don’t know actor Sami Bouajila you haven’t watched enough French action thrillers. Bouajila has carved out a niche playing the calm, calculating cop, criminal or a combination of both who can suddenly explode into action. His sleepy facial features and measured tones mesmerise the audience, […]

Paradise lost in Gallic thriller

Transfusion  ★★★ FORMER Australian rugby league player Matt Nable isn’t a name synonymous with cinema. But he made an impact by writing the first film he also starred in, 2007’s The Final Winter, and a procession of tough guy roles since. Apart from that debut, one of his performances was […]

Rugby man is now a player

The Lair  ★★★ I’M NOT sure what’s going on with Neill Marshall. The British director was lauded in the early 2000s for two great horror films, Dog Soldiers and The Descent. But he only made two more features before moving into television for a decade. The move was successful, directing […]

Acting spoils fun creature throwback

Carnifex  ★★½ YOU learn something new and worth knowing every day, even from watching minor horror movies. For instance, if I hadn’t watched Carnifex I wouldn’t have found out the Thylacele was a carnivorous marsupial the size of a lion that lived up to 46,000 years ago. Apparently eight we’ll-preserved sketal remains were found […]

That’s not a marsupial; this is a marsupial

Deadstream  ★★★ SCREEN Life is a new term for those films like Searching and Missing where the entire story plays out on multiple screens and videos. Then there are also hybrids which combine a bit of screen life, hand-held camera work and found footage. There was a hybrid horror film […]

Hybrid haunted house horror

The Whale  ★★★★ HOW to tackle The Whale? Do I focus, as most have done, on lead actor Brendan Fraser’s astonishing performance? Or do I compare Darren Oronofsky’s first directing effort in five years to others in his eclectic and powerful filmography? Or mount a defence of the film against […]

Fraser a revelation in The Whale

Decision To Leave  ★★★★   ANNUAL Academy Awards nominations are always frustratingly difficult to understand. For example, one of 2022’s most universally praised films failed to even get a nod in the Best International Feature category. Who knows why South Korean director Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave was ignored when it’s […]

Decision to leave out perplexing

Babylon ★★★★  STEVEN Spielberg and Sam Mendes have chosen to romanticise the cinema experience in their recent, conventional works The Fabelmans and Empire of Light. Both films are very good, but their younger colleague Damien Chazelle tops them both with the force of nature that is Babylon. Yes, it’s rambling […]

Strap in for ride to Babylon

M3GAN ★★★½    ONE of the worst iconic characters in horror film history is the evil children’s doll Chucky. The fact he has featured in eight films and a television series is not surprising, but that doesn’t make them worth recommending. M3GAN, on the other hand, is a character I […]

Move over Chucky, M3GAN’s in town

Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre  ★★½    THE films of English director Guy Ritchie may be a lot of things, but rarely are they boring. They can be messy, over-the-top and stylistically haphazard, plus Ritchie has a tendency to repeat the same character types and technical choices. Two decades ago […]

Grant saves some of Ritchie’s day

One Cut of the Dead  ★★★ JAPANESE horror comedy One Cut of the Dead is one of the most inventive films of its type of the past five years. Writer and director Shin’ichirō Ueda made the film on a shoestring budget of reportedly around $25,000, shooting for just over a […]

One Cut an inventive horror

Lifechanger  ★★½ CONTRARY to its title, the low-budget horror film Lifechanger isn’t going to change your life. What it will do is give you 80-odd minutes of reasonable entertainment. Writer/director Justin McConnell’s 2018 film is technical proficient but notable more for its story, a variation on the mostly familiar shape-shifter […]

Lifechanger in love