Latest Reviews
Review: Manhattan
★★★ Manhattan has ensconsed itself as a classic and in many ways is the quintessential Woody Allen film with its gorgeous visual style and Gershwin score. But despite being delightfully self-defeating and witty it is also emotionally and intellectually muddled.
Review: The Raid
★★★ The choreography in The Raid is among the most mind-blowingly fast-paced and intricate martial arts choreography you’ll see this side of a Jackie Chan movie, but with literally no story and almost every action movie cliché imaginable, it will appeal to existing martial arts action fans but offer little enticement to others.
AFFFF Review: The Rabbi’s Cat
★★★☆ If you imagine Tintin as an elderly Jew and Snowy as a sassy, back-talking feline, and instead of going on dangerous adventures solving crimes they sit around discussing religion and philosophy at length, you’ll have something close to The Rabbi’s Cat.
DVD Reviews
Blu-ray Review: The Hunter
Video: ★★★★
Audio: ★★★★
Special Features: ★★★☆
Verdict: ★★★★
Highly recommended.
Lists
Ten episodes of The Muppet Show every movie buff should see
The Muppets was not only a great financial success worldwide, it also successfully rebooted a Muppets franchise which had lost its way in the 1990s with endless made-for-TV movies and muppet versions of popular tales such as A Christmas Carol and The Wizard of Oz. As Ricky Gervais once acerbically joked on his radio programme, [...]
Top 20 films of 2011, part two
I began writing for this little blog on the second day of the Melbourne International Film Festival and, surprisingly for me, have managed to keep it going for more than a week. Now if that doesn’t deserve a celebration I don’t know what does, so to bring my first six months of Cinema Quest to [...]
Blog
An open letter to Jim Schembri
Dear Jim, I could handle your “punking” of the “Twitterverse”, even if your outmoded use of buzzwords run into the ground eight years earlier suggested an inability to recognise how desperately unhip you are. In fact, I sympathised with you. I know what it’s like to be caught saying something you shouldn’t have online, and [...]
On lists and star ratings
It’s now December, the month in which two mysterious and omnipresent beings magically appear: Christmas music at shopping centres, and the year-end top ten list. Big-hitters like TIME, New York magazine and Rolling Stone as well as local luminaries such as Quickflix’s Simon Miraudo have got in early to take full advantage of the link-baiting [...]