The New Movies You Can Watch at Australian Cinemas From March 17

Something delightful has been happening in cinemas in some parts of the country. After numerous periods spent empty during the pandemic, with projectors silent, theatres bare and the smell of popcorn fading, picture palaces in many Australian regions are back in business — including both big chains and smaller independent sites in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.

During COVID-19 lockdowns, no one was short on things to watch, of course. In fact, you probably feel like you've streamed every movie ever made, including new releases, Studio Ghibli's animated fare and Nicolas Cage-starring flicks. But, even if you've spent all your time of late glued to your small screen, we're betting you just can't wait to sit in a darkened room and soak up the splendour of the bigger version. Thankfully, plenty of new films are hitting cinemas so that you can do just that — and we've rounded up, watched and reviewed everything on offer this week.

DOG

One of the many 80s comedies on Tom Hanks' resume, Turner & Hooch has already been remade in 2021 as a low-stakes streaming series with nothing worth wagging one's tail about to show for it. Still, it gains a big-screen spiritual successor in Dog, Channing Tatum's return to cinemas after a five-year absence (other than a brief cameo in Free Guy, plus voice-acting work in Smallfoot and The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part). Sub out a police investigator saddled with a canine witness for an Army Ranger transporting a dead colleague's ex-working dog; swap Hanks' uptight everyman for Tatum's usual goofy meathead persona, obviously; and shoehorn in a portrait of America today that aims to appeal to absolutely everyone. The result: a good boy of a movie that Tatum co-directs, isn't without its likeable and affecting moments, but is also a dog's breakfast tonally.

Like pouring kibble into a bowl for a hungry pooch each morning, Dog is dutiful with the basics: a man, a mutt, an odd-couple arrangement between seeming opposites with more in common than the human among them first thinks, and an emotional journey. Comedic hijinks ensue along the way, naturally, although Turner & Hooch didn't involve anyone getting cock-blocked from having a threesome with two tantric sex gurus by its four-legged scamp. Given that Tatum's Jackson Briggs needs to take Belgian Malinois Lulu 1500 miles from Montana to Arizona by car — she won't fly — Dog is also a road-trip film, complete with episodic antics involving weed farmers and fancy hotels at its pitstops. That's all so standard that it may as well be cinema's best friend, but this flick also reckons with combat-induced post-traumatic stress disorder of both the human and animal kind, and ideas of masculinity and strength attached to military service.

When Dog introduces Briggs, he's working in fast food by necessity — think Breaking Bad's fate for Saul Goodman, with Tatum even channelling the same stoic demeanour — as he waits to get redeployed. All he wants is to head back on active duty, but his higher-ups need convincing after the brain injury he received on his last tour. But his direct superior (Luke Forbes, SWAT) throws him a bone: if Briggs escorts Lulu to their former squad member's funeral, after he drove himself into a tree at 120 miles per hour, he'll sign off on his re-enlistment. Lulu has also been changed by her service, so much so that this'll be her last hurrah; afterwards, Briggs is to return her to the nearest base where she'll be euthanised.

Given that Dog is exactly the movie it seems to be, its ending is never in doubt. Accordingly, fretting about Lulu is pointless. The journey is the story, of course, so Tatum and co-director/screenwriter Reid Carolin — also making his helming debut, and reteaming with the former after penning Magic Mike and Magic Mike XXL (and the upcoming Magic Mike's Last Dance) — endeavour to make the small moments matter. That's a line of thinking on par with Briggs' readjustment to civilian life, and similarly howling through his burgeoning bond with Lulu past simply playing chauffeur. Yes, Dog is that obvious. An emotional throughline doesn't need to be novel to strike a chord, though, and this film yaps the message loud and clear. That said, it also trades more in concepts than in fleshed-out characters, making an already-broad story even broader.

Read our full review.

ANONYMOUS CLUB

With her song and record titles — her lyrics as well — Courtney Barnett has long found the words to express how many people feel. It's a knack, talent and gift, and it's helped her rocket to Australian fame and global success within a decade of releasing her debut EP in 2012. As thoughtful and captivating documentary Anonymous Club shows, it's also something she's frequently asked about in interviews. But expressing those lines and the emotions behind them with a guitar and microphone as weapons, plus a riotous melody as armour, is different to sharing them quietly one on one. Directed by her long-time collaborator Danny Cohen, who has helmed a number of her music videos, Anonymous Club begins with this reality. Barnett can pour her heart, soul and observations about life's chaos into the tunes that've made her a household name, achieving something that few others can; when she's on the spot, however, she's as uncertain and awkward as the rest of us.

Barnett's way with words and wordplay in her work, and her lack thereof elsewhere, thrums through Anonymous Club like a catchy riff. The subject doesn't fade, burrowing into the film as an earworm of a song inside a listener's head does, and feature first-timer Cohen doesn't want it to. His movie was shot over three years, starting in 2018, which places it between Barnett's second studio album and her third — and knowing that makes the phrases from their titles, and from her debut record also, echo with resonance throughout the doco. Anonymous Club could've been called Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit, like its subject's first album in 2015. Tell Me How You Really Feel from 2018 would've worked as well. And, yes, Things Take Time, Take Time would've been apt, too, concluding a line of thinking that the film invites anyway — ultimately finding its moniker in a Barnett track from 2014, before all those releases.

Across two tours spanning Europe, the US and Asia, plus stints in Melbourne, Anonymous Club watches Barnett sit and think, and sometimes just sit. It tasks the singer/songwriter with telling how she really feels, and shows her realising the truth that things take time. All of the above is captured on glorious 16-millimetre film and, even within a mere 83 minutes, the backstage documentary is overwhelming comprised of these ruminative, reflective moments — of snatches of Barnett's life caught as she hops between rooms that aren't her own, be it stages or green rooms or hotels or homes she's housesitting. Her thoughts and feelings come via brief chatter in front of the lens (or, more accurately, with the unseen Cohen behind it, shooting with a camera customised to record synchronised sound), and from overlaid snippets of the audio diary he asked her to keep. That's a job she tussles with — more words, more on-the-spot candour rather than deliberated-over lyrics, more struggles — but she still stuck at it for the project's duration.

Frank, earnest and honest, so much of what's uttered is as revelatory as everything that Barnett has sung over the years. She confides in the fly-on-the-wall film via her Dictaphone recordings; as a result, a highly poised, posed, image-conscious portrait, this isn't. "I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about anymore. I just feel like I'm going around in circles and digging myself a deeper hole," she says at one point, and many other statements have the same tone. Jumping from America to Japan to Germany and elsewhere, life on the road gets to her. Back in Australia, life without a fixed space to call her own after spending so long touring has a similar impact. "My heart is empty, my head is empty, the page is empty," she offers, another telling statement. "It feels like I'm being part of this scripted performance of what we think we're supposed to see on stage, and it just feels really pointless," she also advises.

Read our full review.

PREPARATIONS TO BE TOGETHER FOR AN UNKNOWN PERIOD OF TIME

Will they or won't they? Do they or don't they? Every time that romance and relationships are portrayed on-screen, at least one of these questions always echoes. In the entrancingly moody and astute Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time, it's the latter. Whether Hungarian neurosurgeon Márta Vizy (Natasa Stork, Jupiter's Moon) and fellow doctor János (Viktor Bodó, Overnight) will end the film in each other's company still remains a pivotal part of the plot, but if there's ever been anything between them — or if it's all simply in Márta's head — is the far more pressing concern. She's a woman smitten, so much so that she's returned home from a prestigious job in the US just for him. But his behaviour could be called vague, rude or flat-out ghosting, if he even remembers that they've crossed paths before — and, if they ever actually have.

Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time first introduces Márta as she's unloading her János-sparked romantic woes upon her therapist. What could've been a standard rom-com or romantic drama setup soon twists into something far more alluring and intriguing, however. Indeed, as writer/director Lili Horvát (The Wednesday Child) ponders the role of memory in affairs of the heart, her film just keeps inspiring more trains of thought. How can we ever know how someone else really feels about us? How long will any romantic emotions last, and can they last? Is it ever truly possible to trust whoever our hearts fall or, or our hearts to begin with? And, can we genuinely believe those intense memories of love that implant themselves inside our brains, refuse to leave and inspire life-changing decisions — or is love too subjective, no matter how deep, real, shared and strong that it feels?

These queries all spring from Márta's homecoming, after she meets János at a conference in New Jersey, then pledges to do so again a month later on a Budapest bridge. She shows, but he doesn't. Worse: when she tracks him down at his work afterwards, he says that he doesn't know her. While tinkering with memory is a familiar film and TV concept — see: everything from Memento and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to Mulholland Drive and Severance — Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time is interested in the emotional fallout from János' claims to have zero knowledge of Márta first and foremost. Confused, unsettled and still wholeheartedly infatuated, she just can't bring herself to return stateside, and also can't get János out of her mind in general.

Scripted with empathy and precision by Horvát, and also shot and styled like a waking dream, Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time isn't easily forgotten either, siding its viewers with Márta over János. This is a haunting and beautifully acted psychological drama that lays bare just how all-encompassing, obsessive, intoxicating and mind-melting love can feel, all as it plays with recollection and its ability to shape our perspectives. The tone is loaded but uncanny — sweet but uncertain, too — and Horvát has fun getting both emotional and cerebral while having her characters cut open brains. The latter happens literally and yes, there aren't many movies quite like this one. Cinema doesn't boast too many performances like the exceptional Stork's, either, which draws viewers into every feeling, question, and pang of both intense affection and shattering uncertainty that flows through Márta.

Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time opened in Melbourne from February 24, and screens in Sydney and Brisbane from March 17.

IT SNOWS IN BENIDORM

Forty-four years have passed since Timothy Spall first graced the silver screen — and what a gift he's given both cinema and television since. He won Cannes Best Actor prize for Mr Turner, earned five BAFTA nominations in five years between 1997–2002, popped up in lively Aussie crime flick Gettin' Square, stole every scene he was in in The Party and recently proved formidable in Spencer. He has everything from multiple Harry Potter movies to playing Winston Churchill in The King's Speech on his resume, too, and also routinely improves whatever he's in with his presence alone. In fact, he does exactly that with It Snows in Benidorm, which'd be a mere wisp of a film otherwise. Following a just-made-redundant bank employee to Spain, this meandering drama frequently mistakes mood for depth — and while Spall can't polish away its struggles, he's always the key reason to keep watching.

A fan of the weather and little else, Spall's Peter Riordan has given decades of his life to his employer, and is so settled into the routine he's fashioned around his job that it's as natural and automatic to him as breathing. Accordingly, when he's unceremoniously let go, he finds it difficult to adjust. He's told that being freed from the monotony of his work is a gift, allowing him to retire early — so in that spirit, he heads off to the Mediterranean coast's tourist mecca to spend time with the brother he otherwise rarely talks to. But upon his arrival, Peter finds his sibling conspicuously absent. He still stays in his high-rise apartment, but what was meant to be a family reunion-style holiday now becomes a detective quest. Helping him is Alex (Sarita Choudhury, And Just Like That...), who worked with Peter's shady club-owning brother, might know more than she's letting on about his whereabouts, and also welcomes her new pal's tender companionship the more that they spend time together.

Spall has spent his entire career being described by one well-meaning term: character actor. Here, he's centre stage in a character study instead. He's marvellous in the role — more so in the film's early scenes, where conveying both weight, importance, security and dreariness of Peter's lonely niche relies heavily upon his measured performance, but also whenever sharing moments with the always-luminous Choudhury as the complicated Alex. That said, as written and directed by Spanish filmmaker Isabel Coixet (Elisa & Marcela), It Snows in Benidorm proves as thin as the chance of an avalanche in its sunny setting. The script is more interested in contrivance than letting its characters' thoughts and feelings stew naturally, and revels in a ruminative tone that's ponderous rather than revelatory. It's a holiday photo of a complicated getaway given two hours of focus, in other words, and it's as flimsy as waving around a strip of negatives.

Coixet helms with emotion rather than story in mind, to the detriment of both. There's such a concerted effort to make audiences share Peter's listlessness at home and his awakening abroad that every second feels forced, and the narrative's leaps and languishing never seem authentic. Thanks to Spall, the end result fares better than Coixet's last English-language effort, 2017's abysmal The Bookshop — but the director's latest can't reach the heights of 2003's My Life Without Me and 2008's Elegy. It Snows in Benidorm's reliance upon comedy rarely hits its marks either, other than when dwelling in the British expat-filled hellscape that is Benidorm's nightlife scene. Indeed, its lasting imprint is a 'what if?', because Pedro Almodóvar and his brother Agustín Almodóvar sit among the movie's producers. Being left wondering what wonders might result if Spall and Choudhury teamed up for the Parallel Mothers auteur isn't a ringing endorsement of their current project, though.

DEADLY CUTS

The Full Monty wasn't the first to do it, and it definitely hasn't been the last. But for the quarter century since that crowd-pleasing comedy became an enormous worldwide hit, British movies about underdogs banding together to save their livelihoods and communities have no longer been scrappy battlers themselves. Irish film Deadly Cuts is the latest, joining an ever-growing pile that also includes everything from Calendar Girls to Swimming with Men — and first-time feature writer/director Rachel Carey knows the formula she's playing with. Each such picture needs to be set in a distinctive world, follow a close-knit group, see them face an apparently insurmountable task and serve up a big public spectacle that promises redemption, and every step in that recipe is covered here. But a movie can stick to a clear template and still boast enough spirit to make even the creakiest of plot inclusions feel likely and entertaining enough, and that's this low-budget affair from start to finish.

It does raise a smile that AhhHair, the glamorous hairdressing contest that Deadly Cuts' main characters want to enter and win, is all about innovation in its chosen form. The movie itself would never emerge victorious at such a competition, but it's filled with broad, blackly comic fun along the way, even if it boasts about as much subtlety as a mohawk. The setting: Piglington, Dublin, an as-yet-ungentrified corner of the Irish capital, where the titular salon is a mainstay. The aim: saving the shop from being torn down and replaced with shiny new apartments. The wholly predictable complications: the determination of corrupt local politician Darryl Flynn (Aidan McArdle, The Fall) to forge ahead with the development, which'll boost his bank account; and the suburb-scaring thugs led by the overbearing Deano (Ian Lloyd Anderson, Herself), who throw their weight around at every chance they get.

While lead stylist Stacey (Ericka Roe, another Herself alum) has her heart set on AhhHair glory — a dream that her colleagues Gemma (Lauren Larkin, Love/Hate) and Chantelle (Shauna Higgins, Dating Amber) share — their boss Michelle (Angeline Ball, perhaps best known for The Commitments three decades back) is much less enthused. In another of the script's obligatory choices, the latter has a far-from-joyous history with the event and its head judge D'Logan Doyle (Louis Lovett, Moone Boy), and remains reluctant even when basking in the contest's fame and acclaim might be the only thing that'll keep her salon and Piglington itself going. Of course, movies like Deadly Cuts always find ways to get their characters to the big dance, especially when the odds are overwhelmingly stacked against them. Once there, their mission doesn't get easier. "You've got about as much chance as a dark brunette going to a platinum blonde in one step without her hair falling out," one rival spits at them.

There's pluck to Stacey and her hair-snipping crew as they sharpen up their scissors, unfurl their curlers and do everything they must to whip up show-stopping styles to dye/die for — and yes, Deadly Cuts does take its name seriously. As a result, there's the same verve to the movie itself, which dips itself not only in the usual underdog formula, but in twisted OTT crime comedy as well. Patchiness comes with the territory, including in quick-fire gags that don't always land and lines of dialogue that are blunter than rusty clippers, but Carey's film still strives forth with ambition and confidence. Buoyed by game performances, it's the movie equivalent of rocking a by-the-book do and an outrageous hue at once, even if it's far better when it's skewing darker.

If you're wondering what else is currently screening in Australian cinemas — or has been lately — check out our rundown of new films released in Australia on November 4, November 11, November 18 and November 25; December 2, December 9, December 16 and December 26; January 1, January 6, January 13, January 20 and January 27; February 3, February 10, February 17 and February 24; and March 3 and March 10.

You can also read our full reviews of a heap of recent movies, such as Eternals, The Many Saints of Newark, Julia, No Time to Die, The Power of the Dog, Tick, Tick... Boom!, Zola, Last Night in Soho, Blue Bayou, The Rescue, Titane, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, Dune, Encanto, The Card Counter, The Lost Leonardo, The French Dispatch, Don't Look Up, Dear Evan Hansen, Spider-Man: No Way Home, The Lost Daughter, The Scary of Sixty-First, West Side Story, Licorice Pizza, The Matrix Resurrections, The Tragedy of Macbeth, The Worst Person in the World, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, House of Gucci, The King's Man, Red Rocket, Scream, The 355, Gold, King Richard, Limbo, Spencer, Nightmare Alley, Belle, Parallel Mothers, The Eyes of Tammy Faye, Belfast, Here Out West, Jackass Forever, Benedetta, Drive My Car, Death on the Nile, C'mon C'mon, Flee, Uncharted, Quo Vadis, Aida?, Cyrano, Hive, Studio 666, The Batman, Blind Ambition, Bergman Island, Wash My Soul in the River's Flow and The Souvenir: Part II.