Orlando Bloom and Cara Delevingne star in this Victorian fantasy world filled with mythological immigrant creatures whose rich homelands were invaded by the empires of man.

This growing immigrant population struggles to coexist with humans in the grimiest section of the city— forbidden to live, love, or fly with freedom.

But even in darkness, hope lives, as a human detective, Rycroft Philostrate (played by Orlando Bloom), and a refugee faerie named Vignette Stonemoss (played by Cara Delavigne) rekindle a dangerous affair despite an increasingly intolerant society. Vignette harbors a secret that endangers Philo’s standing during his most important case yet: a string of gruesome murders threatening the uneasy peace of the Row. As Philo investigates, he reveals a monster no one could imagine.

THE RIGHTEOUS GEMSTONES

The Righteous Gemstones follows the world famous Gemstone televangelist family, a global TV and arena ministry who fly in private jets, wear ludicrously opulent clothes and live in huge mansions and estates - all while doing the Lord’s work. Their moral rectitude and solid reputations are at risk when eldest brother Jesse is compromised by a blackmailer who threatens to undo all that their family has built – so Jesse sets out to devise a plan to thwart the blackmailers, while attempting to gain the assistance of his siblings, Kelvin (played by Adam Devine) and his sister Judy (Edi Patterson) with whom he has very rocky and difficult relationships. For fans of Danny McBride and his style of comedy, as exemplified by his other HBO comedy shows Vice Principals and East Bound and Down, this is very much in the same vein as those tonally speaking – it’s the same team of writers and directors (David Gordon Green and Jody Hill) and  - it’s also very, very funny. It’s very fertile ground for a comedy and if you’re after some raucous and edgy laughs – get on it. It’s just premiered on Foxtel.

SUCCESSION SEASON 2

I’ve reviewed this before season one premiered - it’s now in its second season. It’s currently on Foxtel on the Showcase channel – The showrunner Jesse Armstrong co-created The Thick of it and Peep Show and wrote a script some years ago called Murdoch….it made ‘The Black List’ (of top un-produced screenplays in Hollywood). He fictionalised it and turned it into Succession. It’s about the fictional Roy family, the dysfunctional owners of a global media empire – run by the family’s overbearing, histrionic and demonic patriarch, Logan Roy (Brian Cox).

In Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino tells two concurrent stories that intertwine: one follows Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), a fictional character who’s a composite of any number of movie stars who made the transition from TV star to the silver screen – actors such as Steve McQueen and Burt Reynolds. Rick Dalton is most well-known for starring in a TV Western series called Bounty Law but his film career is on the decline (though he was the third lead in a WW2 flick called The Fourteen Fists of McCluskey alongside Rod Taylor)– so Rick is panicking. He’s overly anxious about his job prospects and intermittently has flashbacks, dwelling on ‘what could’ve been’ when he’s missed out on starring-role opportunities that could’ve saved his career. The yin to Rick’s yang is Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), Rick’s long-time stunt double and best friend, who has also become his driver and personal assistant. Burt Reynolds had Hal Needham, his best friend and stuntman, likewise Steve McQueen had Bud Ekin (who executed the famous motorbike jump in The Great Escape and the car stunts in Bullitt), who was McQueen’s best friend and stuntman – and so it goes that Rick has Cliff. Both are functioning drunks and Rick, despite being hungover a good deal of the time -  is a talented actor, at times quite emotional and vulnerable as well as being extremely charming. Cliff on the other hand, is a war veteran, terminally stoic and laid-back – refusing to let anything disrupt his chillaxed exterior.

DiCaprio and Pitt have terrific chemistry – very much a Butch and Sundance dynamic– and we’re happy to amble along with them on the ride – quite literally – as we’re frequently in the back seat of Rick’s coup de ville, cruising along with them through an elaborately recreated Los Angeles of the era. But being Quentin Tarantino –  he digresses extensively – much like a meandering conversation about movies between film geeks, with one movie leading to another, then leading to another, then a genre connects to a star, the star connects to a director and so on, in a free-associative frenzy of film styles, film art and film ephemera: Mad Magazine and TV guide covers featuring DiCaprio, Spaghetti western posters for films he’s made, the FM Radio station that pumps the tunes that comprise the film’s soundtrack (which seems to be on in every car, transistor radio and store) and in general, the level of detail in the world that’s being recreated is INSANE. So while DiCaprio’s Rick works on a TV show, we follow Brad Pitt’s Cliff as he kills time, fixing Rick’s rooftop TV aerial, loitering around Rick’s trailer on The Green Hornet set where Rick is starring as a bad guy of the week, then getting into a fight with Bruce Lee who’s holding court, bragging about his fighting prowess. The connective tissue of the film, being at once Hollywood film and LA history, also operates largely on a meta level – for instance one character has a backstory where he may-or may not have – killed his wife on a boat – which echoes the Natalie Wood & Robert Wagner scandal, there’s a scene where Brad Pitt’s Cliff rebuffs an underage girls advances, which feels like a comment on the Roman Polanski scandal and so on – the film is packed with these kinds of references – plot-wise, character-wise and in the casting – where a TV western star plays a TV western star (Deadwood’s Timothy Olyphant) and the children of Hollywood stars play members of the Manson Family (such as Kevin Smith’s daughter Harley Quinn, Andi MacDowell’s daughter Margaret Qualley) as well as children of stars playing numerous other cast members like Maya Hawke – Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke’s daughter and also Rumer Willis. So the casting itself is another layer of these meta-connections, more threads in this tapestry of Hollywood folklore. We follow Rick as he films a TV pilot, playing a black-hatted villain on the new series Lancer, then gets into a philosophical chat about acting with his 8-year-old co-star before we’re thrust into an extended segment of the show itself featuring Luke Perry, where DiCaprio delivers a stellar example of just how great an actor he is.

Meanwhile, Cliff’s out driving Rick’s Coupe de Ville and picks up a hitchhiking hippie girl named ‘Pussycat’ who asks to be taken to the Spahn Movie Ranch, where Cliff recalls shooting TV shows years earlier. It’s at this ranch that the Manson acolytes live, which also highlights the bizarre sense of reality and Film and TV fiction colliding, which is a theme of the film. That Spahn ranch sequence in particular is terrifically tense. It’s well-known that Charles Manson wanted to be a singer but he also wrote a script - and stalked Steve McQueen in order to pitch it to him, insisting McQueen’s Solar Productions produce the film. The conversation went south, ending with McQueen breaking Manson’s nose. Consequently, McQueen was one of the celebrities on Manson’s ‘Kill List’.

The other side of all this is Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), who along with her husband, Roman Polanski (Rafal Zawierucha) rents the house next to Rick Dalton’s on Cielo Drive. Robbie is really great here as Tate, playing her as a light-hearted optimist, an enthusiastic and warm party-girl, she loves the movie business and – in a flip side to Rick’s character - is hopeful about her future as an actor. We follow her as she buys a first edition for her husband, then impulsively goes to a cinema see herself starring in The Wrecking Crew, a spy caper with Dean Martin. It’s this sequence that I found really moving, but alternately quite personal for Tarantino – we see clips from the film but rather than replace Tate in the film digitally with Margot Robbie – we can see the real Sharon Tate performing in it instead.  The fictionalised Sharon Tate gleefully puts her bare feet up on the seat and watches the film as an audience member. An actress playing an actress, watching herself as an actress. Meta, meta and more meta.

To say any more about the story is to ruin it, suffice to say, this is less a glib revision of history for laughs or thrills and more a deeply personal and loving homage to a bygone era of Studio TV and Film that was on the decline at the time the Manson murders occurred, the period itself is a crossroads: for the kinds of films being made and for the culture – and counter-culture -  itself. As Joan Didion said in her essay The White Album, the night of the Manson murders was “the day the sixties ended”.

Mindhunter Season two lands on Netflix on Friday August 16th. Preacher Season Four is currently airing on Stan and The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance is landing on Netflix on August 30th. Click below to hear me waffle about my thoughts on these shows…

A spin-off from the dunder-headed Fast & Furious franchise, (hence the ludicrously long title ‘Fast and Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw’) in case we forget the origins of the characters. This actioner is centered around the titular Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) and Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham) introduced to audiences in the main franchise films. They are unlikely allies forced to team up against a terrorist organization threatening the world with a deadly virus. Idris Elba stars as the ridiculously named bad guy Brixton Lore, Vanessa Kirby (from The Crown) stars as Hattie Shaw, the sister of Jason Statham (who is around 20 years older than her), and Helen Mirren also appears as their mum.

What’s the verdict? Have a listen and find out.

‘The Boys’ imagines a universe in which superheroes are actual celebrities – owned, monetised and commercialised by the Vought Corporation– who promote the heroes via their own film franchises (in which they are deified and mythologised), as well as through merchandising and sponsorships – and the heroes exist in a showbiz-like hierarchy - much like celebs do in our world – so there’s A-listers – who are in an ‘Avengers’-like team known as ‘The Seven’. Heading the team is Homelander – who is a combination of Captain America and Superman – he’s quite fascinating in that he’s got very dodgy fascist leanings – almost in the Nietzschean sense of the ‘Ubermensch’ – wanting to dominate and rule humanity like a benevolent dictator who knows what’s best.

When lightning fast Flash-esque superhero ‘A-Train’ accidentally runs through the body of Robin, the girlfriend of Hughie (played by Jack Quaid) it sets off a chain of events that sees CIA operative and deranged vigilante Billy Butcher (played by Karl Urban) approach Hughie for help in bringing down the Vought Corporation, which Billy believes is corrupt and dangerous. Of course, Billy has his own reasons for taking aim at the superheroes and we’re off on an anarchic, gorey and very funny adventure, where the ‘normies’ take on the ‘supes’.

Spider-Man: Homecoming was an enjoyable Marvel Universe re-boot for Spiderman after the other Sony pictures incarnations with Tobey MacGuire and Andrew Garfield. Director Jon Watts elicited a hugely appealing turn from Tom Holland in the title role and it proved a big hit with fans. The new film Spiderman: Far From Home arrives on the heels of the Oscar winning animated film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which as well as easily being the best Spiderman film so far, was probably one of the best films released last year, period. This latest sequel ties up the loose story threads post-Avenger’s Endgame as well as giving us a serving of Peter Parker’s quest for normality in a world that’s anything but.

Check out my review here:

Danny Boyle and Richard Curtis imagine a world without The Beatles. Check out my review:

Bone Tomahawk and Brawl In Cell Block 99 Writer/Director, S. Craig Zahler returns with another re-jig of a genre staple, as well as his trademark B-movie exploitation vibe, strangely languorous character development and jarringly graphic violence. Is it any good? Check out my review HERE

S.Craig Zahler (left) and Mel Gibson on the set of Dragged Across Concrete

Irish Writer/Film Critic/Broadcaster & Filmmaker Mark Cousins, has made a fascinating new Orson Welles documentary. Check out my review here

In the 1950’s and 60’s, the heyday of the Broadway musical, Bob Fosse (played by Sam Rockwell) was one of the premier choreographers. Gwen Verdon (Michelle Williams) was a much sought-after Broadway dancer and comedian. They both lived for the stage and for creative collaboration. Fosse won five Tony's for best choreography during his years on Broadway- and then in the late ‘60’s and early ’70s he started directing movies: Sweet Charity with Shirley MacLaine, which was a box office failure, then Cabaret with Liza Minelli, which garnered eight Oscars including Best Director. Fosse then made Lenny with Dustin Hoffman, about the legendary stand-up comedian Lenny Bruce, then auto-biographical musical All That Jazz,  in which he was portrayed by Roy Scheider – it won the Palme D’or at Cannes in 1979 –  and in it, Fosse depicted himself as a pill-popping, philandering workaholic. Not too far from the truth – but people are complicated. Verdon and Fosse were married, contributed creatively towards each other’s work, but Fosse’s philandering saw them become estranged, yet they remained friendly and still very much professionally intertwined. Fosse/Verdon uses a fragmented style of flashbacks and editing reminiscent of Fosse’s own style and follows their careers from when they were both young dancers, right through their successes and their failures. Fosse became increasingly dependent on Verdon for creative support, as his career goes stratospheric and hers stagnates. Their relationship IS dysfunctional - but aren’t they all? She was instrumental in the making of Cabaret and many of his stage productions (very much the dynamic that Hitchcock famously had with his wife Alma, where Hitchcock wouldn’t make a film unless Alma approved the script) so Gwen’s input was so integral in Fosse’s process that it’s been somewhat subsumed by Fosse’s reputation. Fosse/Verdon traces their relationship: the sometimes transactional nature of it, through Fosse’s co-dependency and self-destructiveness as well as the grey areas and the complexity of the emotional baggage they both carried.

The Chef Show features filmmaker Jon Favreau (Iron Man 1 & 2, The Jungle Book and The Lion King) and his friend Roy Choi, who trained him in the run-up to his role in his own film Chef, which is currently screening on Netflix. Over the eight episodes, Favreau and Choi experiment with their favourite recipes and cook with other well-known US chefs. Favreau and Choi share an exhaustingly delicious feast with some of The Avengers cast in Atlanta, smoke brisket in Texas and recreate many of the recipes that featured in his feature film Chef .

I Am Mother is set in the future, after an extinction event has wiped humanity from the earth. Deep underground, inside a high security bunker, a robot named Mother (voiced by Rose Byrne and performed by Luke Hawker) has been designed to repopulate humanity from immense stores of frozen embryos and she cares for a child, as she ages from an infant into a teenager.

Chernobyl is, among many things, a cautionary tale of the dangers of authoritarian state bureaucracy and of politicians and career party men with vested interests in maintaining their power, being unable or unwilling to deal with a catastrophe. As Upton Sinclair said: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" Here’s my review:

Dexter Fletcher (who most people would know as an actor from TV’s Press Gang, Band of Brothers and Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels) previously directed a musical with 2013’s Sunshine on Leith - an adaptation of the stage musical featuring the music of ’The Proclaimers’ – so between that and the Bohemian Rhapsody debacle (he performed directing duties for the final two weeks of principle photography when director Bryan Singer was booted off that film) he’s played in the musical sandbox enough times to know how to suffuse a sense of fun, energy and warmth into a story.

Rocketman frames its plot with the device of a rehab therapy group, allowing Taron Edgerton’s Elton John to jump through his bio (performing all the songs himself and doing a hell of a job), at first with Elton's early years – when he was known as Reggie Dwight and a prodigy at the Royal Academy of Music, living with his mother Sheila (Bryce Dallas Howard) and struggling with his distant, authoritarian father (Steven Mackintosh), then tracking the start of his musical partnership with Bernie Taupin (Jamie Bell) and ultimately his burgeoning stardom and stratospheric US success under the volatile management of lover/handler John Reid (Richard Madden).

Is it worth checking out? Have a listen and find out…

Richard Brown , Executive Producer of HBO’s True Detective , sat down with Aussie author Luke Davies (who wrote the book Candy & the recent Oscar-nominated film Lion)  and his writing collaborator Australian filmmaker David Michod (who wrote and directed the films Animal Kingdom, War Machine with Brad Pitt & The Rover) and they discussed ideas for a limited-series adaptation that would operate much in the same way that True Detective did – like a novel rather than a film. During that chat, a new adaptation of Joseph Heller’s classic satire Catch 22 was pitched. George Clooney and his producing partner Grant Heslov got involved soon after and the production was greenlit at Hulu in the US. Here in Australia, presumably because of their current deal with Disney, who own Hulu, it’s streaming on Stan.

 The book Catch 22 was adapted into a film in 1970 by Mike Nichols (who at the time had just done The Graduate and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf) and as an adaptation, that version was not very successful – the book was undoubtedly too unwieldy to adapt for the screen at that time.

This new version of Catch 22 seems to have cracked the fragmented structure of the book and re-worked it more successfully into a coherent whole. It stars Christopher Abbott (Girls) as the main character John ‘Yo-Yo’ Yossarian, he’s a world-weary recruit making his way through basic training as a US Army Air Force bombardier in World War II and he’s having an existential crisis about combat and the fact that people he has never met are trying to kill him.

Soon he’s in Italy, running bombing raids into Germany and his slightly crazed base commander Colonel Cathcart (played by Kyle Chandler) keeps increasing the number of bombing raids that his men need to fly in order to complete their tours of duty. So Yossarian starts to consult with the base’s Doctor (played by the show’s producer/director Grant Heslov) to find out how he can avoid risking death with further bombing raids by saying he’s crazy.

This week I’m talking about a Franco-Zombie survival thriller that’s worth casting your eyeballs over (metaphorically not literally)….

Here’s me waxing lyrical on the radio about Jordan Peele’s new joint and throwing down some serious sizzle for his follow-up to Get Out, a new horror flick called Us…

Filmmaker Amma Assante’s sophomore feature Belle explored issues of mixed-race families, racism, class and identity within the historical context of 18th century England. Her next film A United Kingdom also explored similar themes. However, in her latest film, she once again draws on these themes but sets it in a historical milieu that’s difficult territory to navigate: World War Two and The Holocaust.

The movie begins in 1944, in the painterly-looking town of Rüdesheim, in the Rhine Valley. The Rhineland people of colour include those derisively referred to as ‘Rhineland bastards”, who’d been fathered by French soldiers of African background, during the Rhineland’s occupation in the period following World War I.

Leyna (Amandla Stenberg) is one of these children. Her white German mother, Kerstin (Abbie Cornish) feels the pinch from local Gestapo hounding her family for identification papers and after seeing their neighbours carted off in the middle of the night, fears for her own family. So, the family moves to Berlin in the erroneous hope that there might be safety in numbers in the big city.

In Berlin, Leyna meets Hitler Youth member Lutz (George MacKay), who along with his secret Jazz music listening SS commander father (Christopher Eccleston), both secretly detest the war, conceal their pacifist leanings by towing the Nazi Party line and long for a life away from the horrors of reality. It’s this pacifist side that Lutz displays to Leyna and soon the pair falls for each other. Inevitably, cruel fate intervenes and Leyna is sent to a brutal workers camp, where she must find it in herself to endure, not only for her own sake but for her family’s as well.

The performances are affecting, particularly George MacKay who portrays a difficult character and imbues him with an awkward, diffident humanity. The film was shot on the UK’s Isle of Man, standing in for 1940s Germany so it does at times fall prey to its budgetary constraints, though the painterly cinematography and stylised production design helps give the proceedings a fable-like quality, particularly in the later scenes in the workers camp.

Assante’s deft direction has steered many of her films through plots that involve tricky racial and social minefields. Here, it’s particularly inflammatory due to the nature of the film’s romantic angle, between a ‘Nazi’ and a mixed-race German girl, though the ‘Nazi’ is merely a Hitler Youth, and a sensitive, conflicted pacifist at that.

US media has been bafflingly unkind in its lambasting of the socio-political optics of the film, with a reading of the plot that is patently reductive and reactionary. One of the film’s admirable qualities is presenting complex characters questioning their own actions, and showing us individuals who sometimes act in spite of their own closely held beliefs and others who act according to them, in other words: flawed human beings.

Survival dramas are at their best when the protagonist is smart about their choices, pre-empting possible dangers and demonstrably resourceful in the face of them. This storytelling tenet is on full display in filmmaker Joe Penna’s debut drama.

As the film opens, we find plane crash survivor Overgård (Mads Mikkelsen) stranded in the icy tundra and some weeks into his ordeal. A massive S.O.S sign carved deep into the snow, he tends to fishing-lines dangling through ice holes and places the fish he’s caught into a storage chest buried in the snow. Having already established the bare necessities, Overgård spends his days hand cranking a dynamo that powers a transmitter, hoping like hell for a rescue.

Through a series of events, Overgård witnesses a helicopter crashing nearby in high winds. When he reaches the wreckage, he finds a sole survivor: a woman (Maria Thelma Smáradôttir) who he pulls from the wreckage unconscious, but alive. Overgård tends to her wounds, then sets about examining maps from the downed helicopter to find the nearest base or place of rescue.

Revitalised with a sense of purpose and determination, Overgård lashes the wounded woman to a rescue toboggin, wraps her for the cold, then sets out into the white, towing her barely conscious body on an epic walk across the bitterly cold and windswept ice.

Virtually dialogue free, the dramatic heavy lifting is handled predominantly by Mads Mikkelsen’s weathered face. Pain, desperation, empathy, elation, sorrow; it’s all writ large within the lines of Mikkelsen’s hypnotic noggin.

Filmed in Iceland over 19 days, director Joe Penna and co-writer Ryan Morrison originally set the story on Mars, rewriting it for a real-world scenario after the success of Ridley Scott’s The Martian.

The simplification of the story and plotting frees the film, liberating it from laborious exposition. We know so little about Overgård, it serves to heighten the audience experience because we’re forced to fill in the gaps ourselves as to who we think this man is, based solely on his actions.

Mikkelsen has called the film’s production ’the hardest of his career’ and he stuns with an effortlessly magnetic performance. The quiet stoicism of the film, its lack of theatrics and showy set-pieces, set it apart from most films of this ilk, akin to a Robert Bresson film in its stark minimalism and use of purely visual cinematic storytelling.

Director Joe Penna was a YouTube viral sensation back in the early days of the video platform. In the years since, he’s channelled his internet fame into making short films. This transition to feature directing shows a confident and deft directorial style, that eschews short-changing the audience by taking dramatic shortcuts and instead favours F. Scott Fitzgerald’s adage that ‘character is plot’, focusing on the minutiae of survival and the humanity that can be found in desperation, wordlessly fleshing out characters through action and ordeal.

Captivating stuff.

Tina (Eva Melander) is a Swedish border control officer with an almost preternatural ability to smell people’s emotional states, making her extremely effective at seeking out illicit carriers of contraband.

Her almost Neanderthal appearance (protruding teeth, heavy brow, bristled hair and thick set nose) and a lifetime of rejection and stares, makes her withdrawn and cautious of people’s intentions. She keeps to herself, living in a cabin in the woods where her only company is her feckless live-in boyfriend Roland (Jörgen Thorsson), who seems to love his show dogs more than her.  Her only other relationship is with her elderly father (Sten Ljunggren) who she visits often, though he suffers from dementia and struggles to remember her at times.

One day, while working at her border control station, Tina encounters Vore (Eero Milonoff) whose luggage she searches. Vore looks almost identical in appearance to Tina, same features, same teeth, though with a charismatic swagger and intensity that Tina struggles to shake off. Who is he? Where did he come from? Tina can’t ‘detect’ anything about Vore, he’s mysterious and intoxicating to her but she feels something dark and dangerous about him.

While in Vore’s presence, her sixth sense is inexplicably muted, and she’s forced to rely solely on her more ‘human’ frailties: her emotions. Driven to investigate her own murky past, and Vore’s, Tina begins to uncover disturbing revelations about Vore and her childhood and the unanswered questions begin to pile up.

Iranian-born, Denmark-based filmmaker Ali Abbasi has crafted one of the most singular and genre-defying films to come along the pike in a great while. Based on a short story by Let the Right One In author John Ajvide Lindqvist, Border (original title: Gräns) is a mind-bending melange of romance, Nordic dark noir and fantasy-horror. It’s almost social realist in its style yet interweaves moments of fantasy with a seamless ease.

Lindqvist co-wrote the script with Abbasi and Isabella Eklöf and it’s a filmic experience unlike anything in recent memory.

Eva Melander and Eero Milonoff’s performances are equal parts subtle nuance and searing, primeval intensity, delivered from under layers of prosthetic appliances. It’s in their characters that the film’s truly haunting edges are revealed and even then, it’s hard to isolate precisely what’s going on in its engine-room; to narrow-down precisely what buttons it’s pushing while you’re watching it. The sheer left-field sideswipe of letting several genres bleed into each other, it creates an unsettling, hypnotic and chilling experience that defies description and prediction. An absolute cracker.