Tim Burton has a bright and bubbly personality, and his delightful new musical Sweeney Todd, will leave you smiling and laughing for days after you see it…. NOT!!!! Read the rest of this entry »

The 90’s was a bit of a golden age for crime films. Thanks to the Tarantino-mania that gripped film industries around the world, hardly a week would go by without a new gritty film about scary, desperate criminals fleeing from even scarier, more desperate criminals hitting the cinemas. Australia was no different. In fact, Bill Bennett’s Kiss or Kill even picked up Best Film at the 1997 AFI Awards - which is interesting because, these days, the film doesn’t stand out as one of the better Australian films of the decade, even within its genre. Read the rest of this entry »

The period around the late 60’s and early 70’s was something of a golden age for crime films. There was something about the sterile light and the grainy film largely in use, along with a prevailing tendency to present stark stories with hard-edged anti-heroes - even the Westerns of the period adopted the flavour. And among crime films of the period, none stands out more than John Boorman’s seminal masterpiece, Point Blank. Read the rest of this entry »

David Cronenberg poses some interesting questions on the nature of evil in his latest thriller. Eastern Promises is a brooding, atmospheric snapshot of a murky London underworld. Apart from focusing on a crime subculture hitherto untreated by films, it presents a mesmerising study of what happens when the world we know brushes up against what lies beneath. Read the rest of this entry »

Brian de Palma has obviously poured his heart and soul into his film of James Ellroy’s famous novel, The Black Dahlia. Unfortunately, beyond the superficial style and artistry, it fails in almost every other respect. Read the rest of this entry »

Now that George Clooney has amassed enough personal capital to be able to pick and choose exactly what he wants to do, he seems intent on re-typecasting himself as the troubled soul trapped in subservience to an immoral paymaster. He did it to good effect in Syriana and he’s done it again in Michael Clayton. Read the rest of this entry »

The term “taut thriller” gets bandied about quite a bit these days, but no film in recent memory deserves the epithet more than the Coen brothers’ latest piece of work, No Country For Old Men. Read the rest of this entry »