Overview
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.
THE UNBEARABLE WEIGHT OF MASSIVE TALENT
"Nic fuckiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing Cage." That's how the man himself utters his name in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, and he knows what he's about. Now four decades into his acting career to the year — after making his film debut in Fast Times at Ridgemont High under his actual name Nicolas Coppola, playing a bit-part character who didn't even get a moniker — Cage is keenly aware of exactly what he's done on-screen over that time, and in what, and why and how. He also knows how the world has responded, with that recognition baked into every second of his his latest movie. He plays himself, dubbed Nick Cage. He cycles through action-hero Cage, comically OTT Cage, floppy-haired 80s- and 90s-era Cage, besuited Cage, neurotic Cage and more in the process. And, as he winks, nods, and bobs and weaves through a lifetime of all things Cage, he's a Cage-tastic delight to watch.
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is Cage uncaged, busting out the jazz that is his acting and adoring it, and it's a self-aware, super-meta love letter to its star and all who stan him. It's also a feature that couldn't exist without the thespian who has everything from Guarding Tess and Captain Corelli's Mandolin to The Croods and Pig on his resume; replacing him simply wouldn't work. Again, it's a Cage gem in letting Cage devotees revel in Cage doing every kind of Cage. That said, this Cage comedy is also so overtly designed to inspire Cage mania that it's easy to feel the buttons being pushed. It's the Cage movie that the internet has willed into existence, or film Twitter at least. Case in point: it has Cage realise that Paddington 2 is one of the best movies ever made. It is, but given how well-accepted that is, and how much online attention has stressed that fact — including its once-perfect Rotten Tomatoes score — weaving it into this Cagefest is one of the film's many exercises in stating the obvious.
There is narrative around all that "Nic fuckiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing Cage" and his marmalade bear-loving epiphany. Here, the man who could eat a peach for days in Face/Off would do anything for as long as he needed to if he could lock in a weighty new part. The fictionalised Cage isn't happy with his roles of late, as he complains to his agent (Neil Patrick Harris, The Matrix Resurrections), but directors aren't buying what he's enthusiastically selling. He has debts and other art-parodies-life problems, though, plus an ex-wife (Sharon Horgan, This Way Up) and a teen daughter (Lily Sheen, IRL daughter of Kate Beckinsale and Michael Sheen). So, he reluctantly takes a $1-million gig he wishes he didn't have to: flying to southern Spain to hang out with billionaire Javi Gutierrez (Pedro Pascal, The Bubble), who is such a Cage diehard that he even has his own mini museum filled with Cage memorabilia, and has also written a screenplay he wants Cage to star in.
Yes, writer/director Tom Gormican (Are We Officially Dating?) and co-scribe Kevin Etten (Kevin Can F**K Himself) task the always-likeable Pascal with playing The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent's on-screen audience surrogate. If you're watching a movie with Cage as Cage — one that begins with a clip from Con Air at that — then you'd likely jump at the chance to spend time with the inimitable figure. Who wouldn't? But that's just one element of the story, because two CIA agents (The Afterparty's Tiffany Haddish and Ike Barinholtz) inform Cage that his new pal is an arms dealer who's keeping a politician's daughter hostage to sway an election. And, they want him to indulge his host — undercover as himself, naturally — until they find the girl. The next key aspect of the tale: during this ruse, Cage and Javi genuinely become CBFFs (Cage best friends forever), including while working on a screenplay about new buddies who bond in chaotic circumstances.
Read our full review.
THE NORTHMAN
Satanic goats don't talk in The Northman. Heartthrobs don't masturbate while fondling mermaid figurines, either. Still, within ten minutes, pre-teen Viking prince Amleth (Oscar Novak, The Batman), his glory-seeking warrior father King Aurvandil War-Raven (Ethan Hawke, Moon Knight) and jester-meets-shaman Heimir (Willem Dafoe, Nightmare Alley) descend into a fire-lit cave to take hallucinogens, growl, grunt, bark like wolves and fart like it's a god-given superpower. If viewers didn't know who's behind this bold, brutal, brilliant, and blood- and guts-strewn Scandinavian opus before then, there's no doubt from this trippy scene onwards: after The Witch and The Lighthouse, writer/director Robert Eggers' touch, approach and style have become that distinctive just three remarkable features into his helming career.
As he first demonstrated with his potent pilgrim horror movie, then doubled down on with his mesmerising oceanside nightmare, Eggers crafts chaotic celluloid dreams about faith- and sanity-stretching dances with madness and mania. He makes features so striking that they're haunting, rippling with the devotedly realistic and the hypnotically occult in tandem. Eggers' work isn't merely meticulously tense and atmospheric; it proves blisteringly visceral to the point of feeling inescapably tangible. Indeed, his steadfast commitment to authenticity spirits the whole concept of immersive filmmaking high into movie Valhalla. See: the vivid period-appropriate detail in The Northman's Nordic villages, which'd only be more evocative if they'd time-travelled in from the ninth and tenth centuries. Sense: the entrancing swirl that springs from all of the above, complete with Eggers' unfailing idiosyncrasies. Experience: the sublime tussle with myth, fantasy and folklore that results, as it has in each of his features, to both plunge into and interrogate his history-set reveries.
In this untamed and laid-bare portrait of the past, something is rotten in the state of Iceland — as it was in Denmark via William Shakespeare, and in the Pride Lands of Africa in both versions of The Lion King. Writing The Northman's screenplay with poet, novelist and Björk collaborator Sjón (Lamb), Eggers takes his cues not from Hamlet, however, but from the Old Norse legend of Amleth that inspired the iconic tragedy. The narrative still involves a son anointed to be the future king, a tragedy that shatters his regal family, and a dastardly uncle who gets murderous to seize the throne and his brother's wife, of course. And, it keeps following its protagonist as he wages a determined odyssey of feral revenge against the man who reshaped his fate so ruthlessly.
"I will avenge you, father. I will save you, mother. I will kill you, Fjölnir." That's Amleth's vow as a boy on a north Atlantic island in 895 when he witnesses the latter's (Claes Bang, Locked Down) treachery. He flees after hearing his uncle bay for his head, too, and seeing him carry off Queen Gudrún (Nicole Kidman, Being the Ricardos) as a spoil of his victory. Two decades later, Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård, Succession) is a hulking, wolfskin-clad Viking berserker, living life flinging whatever weaponry he can find while viciously pillaging through the lands of the Rus. But amid the bloodlust, gore and piling-up body count, the intense marauder is thrust back onto his vengeance-seeking path. A Slavic seeress (Björk, in her first film role since 2005) whispers stark truths about his current savagery and lapsed mission against Fjölnir, reigniting his yearning for that promised slaughter — and the single-minded behemoth learns that his uncle is now sheep-farming in Iceland, having lost the kingdom in another coup.
Read our full review.
ITHAKA
To look at John Shipton is to see the obvious, even if you've never laid eyes upon him before. The family resemblance is immediately clear, and the traits that've likely been passed down from father to son — determination and persistence, blatantly — become apparent within minutes. Shipton needs to be resolute for the battle that documentary Ithaka captures. It's a fight that's been waged for a decade now, publicly, and not just in embassies and courtrooms but across news headlines worldwide. He's visibly Julian Assange's dad, and he's been helping spearhead the campaign for the WikiLeaks founder's release. Assange fell afoul of US authorities in 2010, when his non-profit whistleblower organisation published documents about the American military's war crimes leaked by army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning. As Ithaka makes plain, The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel revealed the same information at the same time; however, only Assange now sits in London's Belmarsh prison.
Plenty about the past 12 years since Manning's leaks were exposed to the world is filled with numbers. Plenty about the ten years this June since Assange first took refuge in the Embassy of Ecuador in London is as well. The Australian editor and publisher spent almost seven years in that diplomatic space, seeking political asylum from sexual misconduct allegations in Sweden that he contended would be used to extradite him to America. If the US succeeds in its efforts, and in its espionage charges against him, he faces up to 175 years in incarceration. The list of figures goes on, but filmmaker Ben Lawrence (Hearts and Bones) makes two pivotal choices. Firstly, he surveys Assange's current struggle not through the Aussie himself, but through both Shipton and Stella Moris, his South African-born lawyer and now wife. Secondly, although those aforementioned numbers are inescapable, the riveting and affecting Ithaka brings humanity to this well-publicised plight.
Moris herself sums up the movie's position best at the unveiling of a statue of Assange in Geneva. "I'm here to remind you that Julian isn't a name, he isn't a symbol; he's a man and he's suffering," she says. It's a reminder that Ithaka's audience might need, given how ubiquitous Assange's tale has become, including on-screen — in fellow docos We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks and Risk, and in dramas Underground: The Julian Assange Story and The Fifth Estate — and how polarising he has proven. Risk attempted to grapple with his contradictions, but Ithaka almost deems them irrelevant. Lawrence doesn't dismiss, excuse or pander; rather, he knows that Shipton and Moris' point remains regardless: that how Assange has been treated for receiving and publishing information is a human rights abuse, as well as an attack on the freedom of the press.
That notion echoes again and again in Ithaka alongside its rousing soundtrack by Brian Eno, and with passion; to look at both Shipton and Moris is to see the fervour blazing tirelessly in their eyes, too. Making his second documentary after 2018's Ghosthunter, Lawrence fills the bulk of his naturalistically shot frames with the pair working against Assange's possible extradition, and for justice, with that avid gleam given ample opportunities to keep burning. Again, among the litany of opinions that he's evoked over the years, the idea that the Australian deserves life in prison for distributing Manning's intel to the world — or that anyone does — shouldn't have a place. Ithaka's allegiances are never in doubt, even without knowing that Assange's brother Gabriel Shipton is one of its producers, but giving time to the WikiLeaks creator's critics wouldn't and couldn't have changed its core position.
Read our full review.
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 January 1, January 6, January 13, January 20 and January 27; February 3, February 10, February 17 and February 24; and March 3, March 10, March 17, March 24 and March 31; and April 7 and April 14.
You can also read our full reviews of a heap of recent movies, such as 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, The Souvenir: Part II, Dog, Anonymous Club, X, River, Nowhere Special, RRR, Morbius, The Duke and Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Fantastic Beasts and the Secrets of Dumbledore, Ambulance, Memoria, The Lost City, Everything Everywhere All At Once, Happening and The Good Boss.