Film Review: Black Bear
★★★★☆ Led by a tour de force performance as savage, unpredictable and frightening as the film’s titular ursine, Black Bear stars Aubrey Plaza in...
Film Reviews & More
Most Recent. In Matthew Anderson.
17 February 2023
Film Review: Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
★★★★☆ Bite-sized pearls of wisdom and wonderment from everyone’s favourite YouTube crustacean sensation make an elegant shuffle, frequent leaps and occasional tumbles from the internet to the big screen in Dean Fleischer Camp’s marvellous Marcel the Shell with Shoes On.
25 May 2022
Film Review: Luzzu
★★★★☆ Maltese-American filmmaker Alex Camilleri’s Luzzu charts a course between the dispassionate neorealism of the Dardenne brothers and Gianfranco Rosi’s keen but objective documentarian eye. It is a touching parable of fathers and sons, tradition and modernity, principles versus practicality.
13 May 2022
Film Review: The Drover’s Wife: The Legend of Molly Johnson
★★☆☆☆ Actor, playwright, novelist and now screenwriter-director Leah Purcell – a Goa-Gunggari-Wakka Wakka Murri woman from rural Queensland – makes her debut with The Drover’s Wife: The Legend of Molly Johnson.
Matthew Anderson
Film Review: Undine
★★★☆☆ Floating somewhere between drama and fantasy, myth and reality, Christian Petzold’s Undine is a beguiling, other-worldly love story between a diver and a...
Film Review: The Mauritanian
★★☆☆☆ Expressly out of sight, with the intention of being out of mind, there were only so many monikers – Gitmo, Camp X-Ray –...
Film Review: Tina
★★★★☆ “Things are not always the way they look, you know.” Behind the forced smiles and false bonhomie of replies to inane talk-show hosts,...
Film Review: Stray
★★★★☆ The saying goes that in the movies you should never work with children or animals. Acclaimed documentary short filmmaker Elizabeth Lo proves the...
Film Review: Ammonite
★★★☆☆ “Last year at this time we had snow, and now it’s nice.” An earth-shattering, potentially life-altering sea-change occurs behind closed doors for two...
SXSW 2021: Under the Volcano review
★★★★☆ Australian director Gracie Otto moves from theatre and film to the music industry for her latest project, again in the search for hidden treasure. With Under the Volcano she strikes gold once more.
SXSW 2021: The Hunt for Planet B review
★★★★☆ Scheduled for launch at the end of October 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope will set the distant red star Trappist 1 – and its potentially habitable exoplanets – in its sights. Its objective? Peering into deepest space to answer one of mankind’s greatest unknowns.
