Tag Archives: Film review

Amma Asante’s latest film A United Kingdom explores the true story of a 1940s relationship between the prince of Botswana and a London office worker, but Dr Janice McRandal delves deeper into the colonial dimensions of the romantic drama. Drawing on the little-known and true-life romance between Sir Sereste Khama and Ruth Williams Khama, A United Kingdom is a beautifully ...

Mel Gibson’s personal transgressions are easily forgotten when witnessing his extraordinary ability to communicate the Christian faith in Hacksaw Ridge. Ashley Thompson reviews. Like Tom Cruise, Mel Gibson can be an easy personality not to like. Like Cruise, Gibson’s controversial personal life is no barrier to profoundly appreciating his talent and contribution to filmmaking. And just when you thought the ...

Since his violent death—shrouded in the kind of controversy that plagued his working life—history has yet to produce a cultural figure quite like Pier Paolo Pasolini. Known in his native Italy for his reputation as a Marxist, gay atheist, Pasolini stretched the definition of a multi-hyphenate to its limit when it came to his professional endeavours: he was (in)famous for ...

A surprising number of films depict characters on the autism spectrum but few accurately illustrate how the neurodevelopmental disorder impacts family like Jack of the Red Hearts (2015). From the classic Rain Man (1988) to the recent The Story of Luke (2012), many filmmakers have grappled with autism as a central plot device but few can claim an intimacy to ...

Is the overwhelming dominance of hyper-masculinity in media harmful to not only the male psyche but community safety? American documentary filmmaker director Jennifer Siebel Newsom would have you believe so. Following The Representation Project’s 2011 documentary Miss Representation—Jennifer Siebel Newsom is back exploring how limited gender stereotypes in media also contribute to a wide range of behavioural disorders among men ...

I didn’t think I’d have to write this review because I was so sure everybody else would. But with an extremely generous Rotten Tomatoes score of 73 per cent and Mediacritic rating of 60 per cent, it is clear many Ghostbusters (2016) reviewers have assessed this film purely on its political merit and without regard for its forgettable narrative, tacky ...

Chasing Asylum exposes the barbarity and secrecy surrounding the Australian Government’s asylum seeker policies, Sue Hutchinson gives her take on the controversial documentary which is destined to become one of the year’s most talked about films. The federal government has demanded absolute secrecy around the offshore detention of so-called boat people, so Australians have had very little idea of what really ...

Blatantly biblical or subtly current—Easter themes of sacrificial love, redemption and resurrection are being told and retold in modern cinema. Ashley Thompson explores. Undertones, analogies and parables—not all Biblical retellings of the Easter story are as obvious as The Passion of the Christ (2004) or The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005). In fact, if evangelism is the goal, ...

“Aren’t we forgetting the true meaning of Christmas? You know, the birth of Santa,” asks Bart Simpson. We wince, and wonder if this is how the post- Christian world really sees us. Have Santa and Jesus coalesced into a single mythical character of indeterminate age and girth, a miracle worker who is great with kids? There is no denying that ...

With the upcoming release of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire at the end of November, buzz is once again gathering around the franchise, originally a trilogy of books written by Suzanne Collins. In September, the first book of the The Hunger Games series was discussed on Jennifer Byrne’s ABC show, Books that Changed the World—alongside titles including Darwin’s The Origin ...