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Force of Nature: The Dry 2 (2024)
Here there be spoilers…Robert Connolly’s The Dry (2021) took on a genre that’s very popular in Australia, if usually only in imported form – a crime drama revolving around a troubled but dedicated...
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Cobra Woman (1944)
For a film that might otherwise have been just another forgotten entry in the ranks of exotic melodramas made in blazing Technicolor during the 1940s for the escapist consumption of a wartime...
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The Naval Battle of 1894 (Jia wu feng yun, 1962)
Where films made in Hong Kong long since gained international prominence and popularity, the films of mainland China made between the Maoist ascendancy and the coming of the so-called Fifth Generation...
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Krakatoa, East of Java (1968)
Mostly a ripping yarn of seafaring and treasure hunting in a distinctly Jules Verne-like mode, Bernard L. Kowalski’s Krakatoa East of Java is notable as one of the few films to deal with arguably the...
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Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (2024)
Here there be spoilers…A direct follow-up by director Adam Wingard to his Godzilla vs Kong (2021), Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire quite literally hits the ground running, with the sight of King Kong...
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Road House (2024)
Rowdy Herrington’s Road House (1989) slipped through the cracks of screen culture in its era, but quickly became a cult object exemplifying that era. A subject for controversy for its over-the-top...
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Sorry, Wrong Number (1948)
Lucille Fletcher’s audio play “Sorry, Wrong Number,” first broadcast as an episode of the anthology radio show Suspense in 1943, became the kind of audience success that in later times would be...
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City Beneath The Sea (1953)
Few if any filmmakers are ever quite as bold off-screen as characters in their movies, but Oscar ‘Budd’ Boetticher came close. The young bullfighting obsessive stumbled into making movies after...
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Civil War (2024)
Alex Garland made the leap from being a writer who broke through at age 27 with his novel The Beach, filmed in 1999 by Danny Boyle, to screenwriter, collaborating with Boyle on 28 Days Later (2003)...
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China (1943)
John Farrow’s China has one of the most arresting openings of any Hollywood film of its era, offering remarkable long tracking shot that anticipates a more recent obsession of filmmakers with...
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Villa Rides (1968)
A splashy but generally ignored by-product of late 1960s screen culture, Villa Rides is part big-budget, bouncy Hollywood action-adventure movie, part epic historical biopic, trying hard to appeal to...
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Twisters (2024)
Here there be spoilers...I suppose. I mean there are tornadoes and the heroes don’t die. Aren’t you surprised?I admit it: when I heard a sequel was being made to Jan De Bont’s Twister (1996), I...
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Journey To The Center Of The Earth (1959)
Henry Levin’s Journey to the Center of the Earth was the product of a string of retro-flavoured, deliberately old-fashioned films made in the 1950s and ‘60s that harkened back to the best-known...
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Battle Of Britain (1969)
Despite being very much an episode of grim and unromantic history, the Battle of Britain has long since achieved quasi-mythic grandeur. The battle saw the outnumbered pilots of the Royal Air Force...
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Assault (1971)
aka In The Devil’s Garden At Heatherdene School, a very posh all-girls seat of learning outside an exemplary regional English town, pretty student Tessa Hurst (Lesley-Ann Down) leaves for the day and...
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The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake (1959)
One of B-movie wizard Edward L. Cahn’s very cheap yet enormously entertaining forays into horror cinema, The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake comes close to embodying a specific ideal of a bygone...
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Alien: Romulus (2024)
Fede Alvarez’s Alien: Romulus is a movie that seems, at first glance, to have many things going for it. Taking on a franchise that’s now getting on for close to half a century old,...
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Gladiator II (2024)
Here there be spoilers…Any commentary I make on Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II must be prefaced by an initial confession. As great a fan and admirer of Scott’s that I am, that love does not extend to the...
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Red Rooms (Les chambres rouges, 2023)
Pascal Plante’s Red Rooms opens with Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy), a good-looking, well-dressed young woman who has nonetheless spent the night like a hobo, camped out in a back alley of downtown...
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Blitz (2024)
Artist-turned-filmmaker Steve McQueen’s first standalone feature as director since the sharp disappointment that was Widows (2018), Blitz could be described as an act of revisionist history. Or,...
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Nosferatu (2024)
F.W. Murnau might have been a little boastful and pretentious when he subtitled his legendary 1922 film Nosferatu“A Symphony of Horror,” but he was also definitely onto something. A great horror...
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The Gorge (2025)
Here there be spoilers … Scott Derrickson’s The Gorge has an immediately intriguing and arresting storytelling hook, and for a surprisingly long time seems to know what to do with it. Former US...
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The English Patient (1996)
Late in 1996, Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient seemed to sweep out of nowhere to become the instant Academy Award frontrunner. The film duly won nine awards including Best Picture, providing...
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Voodoo Man (1944)
Although he was still famous enough to feature in some glossy, big studio-produced horror movies of the 1940s, Béla Lugosi’s fortunes had waned hard since his glory days after Dracula (1931)....
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Torpedo Run (1958)
Submarine movies are an unusual subgenre, reliable and just about always enjoyable, defined as they are by certain near-compulsory elements providing automatic high drama. The sweat-browed captain...
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