Reel Encounters

2002: Long Island, New York. Frank Tassone, a high-school superintendent, impeccably dressed in a fancy suit, preps for an evening assembly meeting with parents of Roslyn High School.

It makes sense that Australian director Justin Kurzel would get around to making a film about Ned Kelly, Australia’s most infamous outlaw.

Can one come of age in their thirties? In many ways, “Endings, Beginnings”, the new feature from director Drake Doremus, is best considered as a kind of delayed coming-of-age story of a woman coming to terms with her life.

Last week, amidst the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, two French doctors appeared on television discussing the possibility of testing experimental treatments against the virus in Africa.

Todd Haynes’ legal thriller “Dark Waters” is a dramatisation of a lawyer’s battle to uncover how the chemical manufacturing corporation DuPont contaminated a town, and a country, with its unregulated chemicals.

As the movie industry slows to a halt, now is as good a time as any to turn to the digitised media that’s available.

Whether you’re practicing social distancing, in self-quarantine or going about your business as normal, it’s hard to ignore that the current times are a bit fraught.

The positive reviews for “Onward” have seemed to damn it with faint praise; it’s good but not excellent, they say, or not quite up the level of the best of Pixar.

It’s, perhaps, a lucky sleight of hand that the majority of films now playing in local cinemas offer great opportunities of counterprogramming for the more serious national and regional issues that we’re facing.

No matter how I try to approach it, “Birds of Prey (and the fantabulous Emancipa-tion of One Harley Quinn)” seems to exist in relation to some other film that came before.

I wandered into the newly released Jane Austen adaptation “Emma” more out of mild curiosity than genuine expectation or interest.

Later tonight the Academy Awards will act as the official closer on the 2019 year in film when the statues for outstanding achievements are handed out to winners – some deserving, some not so much.

Bad movies are nothing new or unusual. Considering the number of films put into production and released each year, they are an unavoidable part of the film industry.

It’s bad form to critique an ad-campaign instead of the film, but the central liability of Taika Waititi’s “Jojo Rabbit” is its own inability to recognise itself.

Common knowledge suggests that January cinema is typically mediocre, it’s where bad movies go to die.

Sam Mendes’s “1917” arrives in local theatres this week as one of the last major films of 2019 to see a worldwide release.

When Andrew Lloyd Webber and Trevor Nunn adapted T.S. Eliot’s “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats” (a series of poems) to the theatrical dance spectacle where a succession of feline characters sing about themselves, they weren’t thinking of filmic dramatic coherence.

Greta Gerwig’s new film, the literary adaptation “Little Women,” feels weighed down by its history.

Fourteen minutes into “Bombshell”, Gretchen Carlson meets with a pair of lawyers.

This review contains mild spoilers for the film. In the ironically titled “Marriage Story”, Nicole (an actress, played by Scarlett Johansson) and Charlie (a director, played by Adam Driver) try to navigate the end of their marriage and custody of their eight-year-old son.