Everyone remembers the great supermarket frenzy of just a few months back, when stores looked like post-apocalyptic film sets, people were everywhere but shelves were bare. And, as a response to the huge onslaught of panic-buying when the COVID-19 pandemic first hit — with shoppers hoarding everything toilet paper and hand sanitiser to pasta and milk — we all remember the item limits put in place by Aussie chains. Two months after local supermarkets started to lift those caps (and after the great bog roll crisis of 2020 seemed like it was over), Coles and Woolworths have been reintroducing restrictions — on some everyday staples, and across all of the two companies' Victorian stores. The first new limits were imposed towards the end of June, including on toilet paper (of course); however more have come into effect since the beginning of July. On the restricted list: toilet paper, hand sanitiser and paper towel, as well as flour, sugar, pasta, rice, mince, long-life milk and eggs. They were all subject to previous item caps, too — and Victorians can now only purchase two of each at Woolies, and either one (of toilet paper and paper towel) or two (of all of the other above items) at Coles. Also limited to two items each at Woolies, since Friday, July 3: 18 other products, including frozen vegetables, loaves of bread, chilled fresh milk, pre-packed sausages, burger patties and tissues. At Coles, two-pack caps were put in place on Tuesday, July 2 on fresh milk, cheese, butter, margarine, chicken breasts, chicken thighs, prepacked carrots and prepacked potatoes, as well as cans of tomatoes, beans, garden vegetables, fruit, meat, baked beans and spaghetti, pasta sauces, and frozen fruit and vegetables. The move comes in response to Victoria's ongoing spike in COVID-19 numbers over the past couple of weeks, which has seen the state take considerable action. The State Government has extended its State of Emergency for four more weeks, launched a suburban testing blitz, tightened some gathering restrictions for all Victorians and reintroduced strict stay-at-home orders for ten Melbourne postcodes that are experiencing the worst community transmission of coronavirus. For more information about the state of COVID-19 in Victoria, head to the Department of Health and Human Services website. For more information about the reinstated item limits at Australian supermarkets, head to the Woolworths and Coles websites.
Back in March 2020, Victoria implemented a State of Emergency in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, a move it has extended monthly ever since. It was currently due to run until March 15, 2021 — after which the Victorian Government wouldn't have been able to extend it again under existing legislation — but, under an amendment that has just been passed by the state's upper and lower houses, the government now retains the power to keep lengthening the State of Emergency until December 16, 2021. That's an extra nine months — but that doesn't mean that the State of Emergency will be active for the entire period. The power to prolong a State of Emergency falls under the Public Health and Wellbeing Act 2008, which states that each declaration can only run for four weeks, before it then needs to be extended. If you're wondering why the new change covered by the Public Health and Wellbeing Amendment (State of Emergency Extension) Bill 2021 is required, that's because there are time limits built into the original act. Coming into effect long before the pandemic, the 2008 legislation only allows for six months of declarations. So, when September 2020 approached, Victoria passed the Public Health and Wellbeing Amendment (State of Emergency Extension and Other Matters) Act 2020, which added a further six months to that timeframe. Now, with the pandemic still causing significant disruptions to life internationally, throughout Australia and in Victoria — and with the state only just experiencing its latest lockdown last month — the latest amendment expands the period for a further nine months. A State of Emergency declaration allows the state's authorised officers to "act to eliminate or reduce a serious risk to public health" as directed by Victoria's Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton. That means restricting movement, preventing entry to premises and venues, and detaining people — measures that have been in place for almost a year now as the state responds to the coronavirus. As part of the negotiations surrounding the latest amendment, the Greens has announced that the party "secured a commitment that specific legislation will be developed for managing COVID-19 in nine months' time". That means that State of Emergency declarations would no longer be needed after December, as other legislation would cover the state's specific response to this pandemic. The Greens also advised that fines under the State of Emergency will also be reduced for people under 18 — and there'll be review process implemented for COVID-19 fines issued to people from disadvantaged backgrounds, including people who experience homelessness, people with mental illness, and people from low-income backgrounds, including young people. To find out more about the status of COVID-19 in Victoria and how to protect yourself, head to the Victorian Department of Health and Human Services website.
It's a film about searching for treasure, and it is indeed a treasure. La Chimera is also dreamy in its look and, while watching, makes its viewers feel as if they've been whisked into one. There's much that fantasies are made of in writer/director Alice Rohrwacher's fourth feature, which follows Corpo Celeste, The Wonders and Happy as Lazzaro — God's Own Country breakout and The Crown star Josh O'Connor leading the picture as a British archaeologist raiding tombs in 80s-era Italy chief among them. Thinking about Lara Croft, be it the game, or the Angelina Jolie (in 2001 and 2003 flicks)- or Alicia Vikander (2018's Tomb Raider)-led movies, is poking into the wrong patch of soil. Thinking instead about the way that life is built upon the dead again and again, and upon unearthed secrets as well, is part of what makes La Chimera gleam. Rohrwacher's latest, which also boasts her Happy as Lazzaro collaborator Carmela Covino as a collaborating writer — plus Marco Pettenello (Io vivo altrove!) — resembles an illusion not just because it's a rare mix of both magical-realist and neorealist in one, too (well, rare for most who aren't this director). In addition, this blend of romance and drama alongside tragedy and comedy sports its mirage-esque vibe thanks to being so welcomely easy to get lost in. As a snapshot of a tombaroli gang in Tuscany that pilfers from Etruscan crypts to try to get by, it's a feature to dig into. As an example of how poetic a film can be, it's one to soar with. The loose red thread that weaves throughout La Chimera's frames, intriguing folks within the movie, also embodies how viewers should react: we want to chase it and hold on forever, even as we know that, as the feature's 130 minutes tick by, the picture is destined to slip through our fingers. Wearing his crumpled linen suits and residing in his makeshift shack, O'Connor's Arthur knows what it's like to not be able to grasp tightly onto what you want. Just as the movie that he's in transports its audience four decades back, he's stuck in the past, obsessing over the missing Beniamina (Yile Yara Vianello, The Beautiful Summer). Stolen Italian artefacts are his trade, with friends to help with the excavations but his own divining methods (rod included) locating where an invisible X marks the spot. When he's not dowsing and delving, or offloading the loot he extracts to antiquities dealers who profit from and perpetuate the cycle of tombaroli thievery far more than Arthur and his pals, the mansion of Beniamina's mother Flora (Isabella Rossellini, Spaceman) is his frequent pilgrimage. It was equally true of The Wonders and Happy as Lazzaro: a movie by Rohrwacher, and with cinematographer Hélène Louvart (Disco Boy, The Lost Daughter, Never Rarely Sometimes Always) behind the lens, is a movie that looks ethereal and earthy at once. Shot on a mix of different film stocks (35-millimetre, 16-millimetre and Super16), La Chimera's imagery virtually floats, but it similarly sees the dirt and the grit. Arthur's journey couldn't better live and breathe that contrast as he illicitly uncovers riches in a marvellous setting, but not without the grime and the risk that goes with it. He also starts the feature freshly released from jail for his grave-robbing manner of making a living, then spends his time chasing more 2000-year-old pieces — pottery, statues and such — that mysterious broker Spartaco will pay for, as punctuated with chats with Flora and a burgeoning connection with her housekeeper Italia (Carol Duarte, Segunda Chamada). The language of archaeology, whether taking from the dead or studying history through its physical remains, is the language of discovering and seeking — and mine, disinter and pursue, Arthur does, including with his feelings and hopes. He pines for his lost love while burrowing down where valuables, secrets and lives gone by are kept; he's navigating his own Orpheus and Eurydice as well. He's haunted, plunging literally to where such torments spring from in humanity's eternal grappling with mortality, and also emotionally and psychologically into memories that gnaw as if they too are possessed. A mastery of symbolism is among Rohrwacher's many skills as a filmmaker; however, so is a command of effortlessly lingering in the realm, as La Chimera does, between the tangible and intangible. Here's another talent to her name: casting, especially with O'Connor standing in front of the camera. While Rossellini's involvement is a magnificent touch — only she can switch to marauding from warm, and back, so naturalistically and so quickly; also, the link with Italian cinema history that she brings via her director father Roberto Rossellini, the neorealist great, is so wonderfully apt — O'Connor is an exquisite choice as La Chimera's lead. Rumpled charm, lost-soul melancholy, drifting and yearning, a hold on his temper that's flimsier than a deal on the relics black market: as Arthur, he conveys or has them all. A picture as enigmatic as this needs someone at its centre that's able to both go with its flow and be grounded — and again, in a role that joins Mothering Sunday, Emma, Hope Gap and Challengers on his post-God's Own Country resume, that's O'Connor. As La Chimera proves evocative and expressive, and loose and playful, it takes its audience on an adventure so layered and distinctive that Rohrwacher could be the only one guiding it. Thoughtful and contemplative as her film also is, it has clear eyes to stare daggers at social inequality, and towards those who think that they can own the past. Forming a trilogy with The Wonders and Happy as Lazzaro — one about beekeepers, the other about sharecroppers, each fascinated with communities that are far from the everyday now, as with the tombaroli — La Chimera almost feels as if it has pulled off a heist itself, then. In ensuring that every single element of the movie works perfectly, this gem steals itself a place as an unforgettable piece of cinema; long may it keep being cherished.
Civil War is not a relaxing film, either for its characters or viewers, but writer/director Alex Garland (Men) does give Kirsten Dunst (The Power of the Dog) a moment to lie down among the flowers. She isn't alone among the movie's stars on her stomach on a property filled with Christmas decorations en route from New York to Washington DC. Also, with shots being fired back and forth, no one is in de-stressing mode. For viewers of Dunst's collaborations with Sofia Coppola, however — a filmmaker that her Civil War co-star Cailee Spaeny just played Priscilla Presley for in Priscilla — the sight of her face beside grass and blooms was always going to recall The Virgin Suicides. Twenty-five years have now passed since that feature, which Garland nods to as a handy piece of intertextual shorthand. As the camera's focus shifts between nature and people, there's not even a tiny instant of bliss among this sorrow, nor will there ever be, as there was the last time that Dunst was framed in a comparable fashion. Instead, Civil War tasks its lead with stepping into the shoes of a seasoned war photographer in the middle of the violent US schism that gives the movie its name (and, with January 6, 2021 so fresh in everyone's memories, into events that could very well be happening in a version of right now). The US President (Nick Offerman, Origin) is into his third term after refusing to leave office, and the fallout is both polarising and immense. Think: bombed cities, suicide attackers, death squads, torture, lynchings, ambushes, snipers, shuttering the FBI, California and Texas inexplicably forming an alliance to fight back, Florida making its own faction, journalists killed on sight, refugee camps, deserted highways, checkpoints, resistance fighters, mass graves and, amid the rampant anarchy, existence as America currently knows it clearly obliterated. (Asking "what kind of American are you?" barely seems a stretch, though.) The front line is in Charlottesville, but Dunst's Lee Smith is destined for the White House with Reuters reporter Joel (Wagner Moura, Mr & Mrs Smith), where they're hoping to evade the lethal anti-media sentiment to secure an interview with the leader who has torn the country apart. That Dunst's character, nor anyone, will never be able to shake the chaos observed and experienced, no matter the no-nonsense demeanour sported, couldn't be more evident from Civil War's opening. This is a raw and deeply resonant movie about trauma, sources for which fill its chillingly realistic visuals constantly, as Garland and cinematographer Rob Hardy (returning from all of the filmmaker's past helming work, including Ex Machina and Annihilation) bring to the screen with haunting immediacy. It's also about desensitisation to that onslaught, for Garland's players and audiences alike. Combine both, even if Lee ignores the personal impact, and you get someone who'll never feel the calm that should accompany lying on a lawn in different circumstances — because the time when she'd soak that in, and the person who could do just that, are long gone. You also get someone so accustomed being surrounded by nightmarish horror that she's no longer aware of what she's lost. Garland's fourth film behind the lens is a probingly complex character study as well. It's a snapshot of a dystopia with far more potential to come immediately true than most such tales — and it gives America and its volatile political reality the filmic treatment usually reserved for almost anywhere else — but it's always also an unpacking of what it means to spend your life immortalising humanity at its worst; pics and it definitely did happen. Navigating the ethics of the gig, Lee is adamant that the job is to chronicle, not to intervene. "We take pictures so others can ask these questions," she advises. Everything about the performance behind not just the line but the figure lives and breathes that idea. That said, she's also as firm in her belief that what she does should spark pause. "Every time I survived a war zone, I thought I was sending a warning home: don't do this," Lee says to Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson, Beau Is Afraid), a New York Times veteran and fellow member of the movie's travelling party. "But here we are," she continues with a sigh. Garland gives Dunst another contrast beyond referencing one of her prior roles: Spaeny's Jessie. (That Civil War arrives so soon after Priscilla, which Dunst recommended Spaeny to Coppola for, adds inescapable emphasis.) Introduced being saved by Lee when they first meet in the thick of a brutal fray, the green as green — and keen as keen — wide-eyed 23-year-old freelancer is similarly snapping the conflict, learning as she's going and convincing Joel to let her tag along. Her vast range of emotions couldn't be in greater opposition to Lee's dispassion. "I've never been so scared in my entire life. And I've never felt more alive," Jessie notes after the movie's most intense scene, an unforgettable nerve-shredder where the foursome and a couple of colleagues (Ahsoka's Nelson Lee and The Brothers Sun's Evan Lai) cross paths with a cruel group of soldiers (led by Dunst's IRL husband Jesse Plemons, Killers of the Flower Moon). No one needs to be familiar with Dunst and Spaeny's cinematic history, and their echoes, to feel the weight of what Civil War is portraying. Spotting the array of cast members from Garland's 2020 sci-fi/thriller TV series Devs — Spaeny, Henderson, Offerman, Sonoya Mizuno (House of the Dragon) as an embedded British correspondent, Jin Ha (Pachinko) as a sharpshooter and Karl Glusman (The Idol) as a spotter — also isn't a must to understand that the author-turned-filmmaker is in his element. Garland has always been fascinated by how folks react to humanity's inherent lust for control and power, whether perpetuating it, fleeing it, being victimised by it or getting it on the record. That was true when he was writing novel The Beach, then penning the screenplays for 28 Days Later, Sunshine, Never Let Me Go and Dredd, too. Indeed, as Lee watches on and documents, Dunst virtually plays her director's in-film surrogate. For all of the ways that Civil War can be linked back to now, to recently, to not mere fiction or conjecture, Garland isn't here to overtly connect dots or take sides; he also began writing his script in 2020, pre-dating the Capitol attack. He knows as a given, as he gleans that everyone will, that fractures have become an entrenched part of the US. As intelligent as it is urgent, Civil War is a cautionary tale, then, but never a source of answers. What it sees is the loss, the toll and the consequences when democracy shatters, all through people, aka Lee and company, including the devastation of such grimness becoming a normality. Making The Virgin Suicides come to mind serves the picture in another way, reminding of a stunning Dunst performance laced with unflinching pain just as she's giving another one at the heart of this arresting and searing feature.
Lean, mean and a Nazi-killing machine: that's Sisu and its handy-with-a-hunting-knife (and pickaxe) protagonist alike. This stunningly choreographed Finnish action film's title doesn't have a literal equivalent in English, but means stoic, tenacious, resolute, brave and gritty all in that four-letter term; again, both the movie and the man at its centre fit the description. Former soldier Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila, perhaps best-known internationally for 2010's Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale) has one aim. After he strikes gold and plenty of it in Lapland's far reaches, he's keen to cash in. For someone who has already lost everyone and everything to World War II, that requires transporting his haul; however, the year is 1944 and German troops still lurk even as the combat winds down. Accordingly, getting those gleaming nuggets from the wilderness to a bank means facing a greedy and unrelenting platoon led by Helldorf (Aksel Hennie, The Cloverfield Paradox), who can spy a payday and an exit strategy for himself. Before anything yellow shimmers, Nazi-filled tanks are sighted, a single shot is fired or a blow swung, Sisu explains its moniker as "a white-knuckled form of courage and unimaginable determination". Text on-screen also advises that "sisu manifests itself when all hope is lost." As a film, Sisu may as well be shorthand for John Wick meets Inglourious Basterds meets Django, the iconic 1966 spaghetti western that Quentin Tarantino riffed on with Django Unchained, too — plus all of that meets the work of legendary spaghetti western director Sergio Leone as well. The carnage is that balletic. The Nazi offings are that brutal, roguish and inventive. And valuing deeds over dialogue as a lone figure dispatches with nefarious forces against an unforgiving landscape, and no matter what they throw at him, is firmly the setup. "He is one mean motherfucker that you don't want to mess with," the Nazis are told of Sisu's one-man death squad after they cross paths, the Germans think that their numbers will win out, and Aatami swiftly and savagely shows their folly. Of course, Helldorf and his underlings don't heed that advice. They're heading to Norway, destroying villages and also transporting a wagon filled with Finnish women they've taken captive, such as the spirited Aino (Mimosa Willamo, Memory of Water) — and the nihilistic Helldorf is soon fixated on the gold at any cost. That's a bad choice for the Nazis but great news for audiences. Enter: minefields proving deadly and also coming in handy, oh-so-many limbs going flying, the most grisly way to breathe underwater that's possibly been seen in cinema, taking the battle onto boats and planes, and Aatami continually demonstrating why he's earned such a fierce reputation. The latter doesn't take kindly to Nazis, as no one should, nor to being attacked, having his gold stolen and, like Keanu Reeves' best character of late, seeing his dog threatened. Sisu writer/director Jalmari Helander also helmed dark festive action-comedy Rare Exports, giving seasonal flicks a memorably twisted spin. Then, although to much lesser success, he cast Samuel L Jackson (Secret Invasion) as a US President evading terrorists-slash-hunters in the woods in 2014's Big Game. Here, he knows which footsteps he's treading in — Mad Max: Fury Road also springs to mind in Sisu's staging, setting and elements of its story — and also how to make his film its own extravagantly bloody and entertaining spectacle. There's ticking boxes, and then there's colouring them in with your own hues and designs so that yes, they've been marked off but in your distinctive manner. Sisu works through everything that audiences think will happen, even winkingly signposting via named chapters splashed across the frame with western-esque font, and yet it's no mere exercise in lazily fulfilling a checklist. Helander is too willing to get as OTT and pulpy as he can manage, to get as immersed in the film's playfully and gruesomely engrossing violence as he's able to, and to keep one-upping the creative and downright novel kills at Aatami's hands. In every case, he's giddily going for broke — and frequently getting in close via cinematographer Kjell Lagerroos (another Memory of Water alum). Sisu casts its solo hero against a sprawling setting that's oppressive in its immenseness in classic western style. The colour palette is colder, though; the feature surrounds Aatami with visible, inescapable, ever-present and grey-tinged desolation, as reality dictates of war movies. Helander paints this intense, grim and devastating big picture, while also seeing the gore and dirt and sweat intimately and intricately. What would the John Wick franchise be without Reeves? Django without the great Franco Nero (who popped up in John Wick: Chapter 2) in his breakout role? A Fistful of Dollars and its sequels without Clint Eastwood (Cry Macho)? The question now: what would Sisu be without the irrepressible Tommila? Every single one of the films just mentioned boasts a sublime mix of perfectly chosen stars and directors doing their utmost — brothers-in-law Tommila and Helander among them. With so few words uttered, Tommila's physical performance has to convey everything. So, a stare screams with ferocity, a gaze at Aatami's dog bubbles with emotion and a twitch is never just a twitch. Watching silent protagonists dispensing with a constant onslaught of foes also gets audiences mirroring the characters, aka surveying the scene for even the slightest change or sign given that even the smallest details can alter so much. As villains get slain again and again — and Aatami keeps weathering what's blasted his way — Sisu unleashes its barrage with weight. That isn't only because the atrocities of the Second World War should never be forgotten. All those lingering views of messy and madcap carnage? They don't just notice Aatami's actions, but show what he goes through as he persists and subsists. This is a film about survival as much as it's about payback. It has stakes and makes them plain, even as it's as blatant a good-versus-evil movie as they come. It's grounded in the past, stripped down to bangs and smacks and crunches that pack a visceral and emotional punch (smashes and crashes, too, with meticulous sound design that makes every pop and snap echo), and pulled off with cartoonish flair. Sisu is many things, just like the term itself in its native Finland — and impossible to stop watching is one of them.
Canines are so beloved in cinema that the Cannes Film Festival even gives them a gong: the Palm Dog, which has been awarded to a performing pooch (sometimes several) annually since 2001. Among the past winners sit pups in Marie Antoinette, Up, The Artist, Paterson, Dogman and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood — most real, one animated, some anointed posthumously and none scoring their prize for a quest to bite off someone's penis. That genitals-chomping journey belongs to the four-legged stars of Strays alone. They're played by actual animals, with CGI assisting with moving lips and particularly raucous turns, and they're unlikely to win any accolades for this raunchy lost-dog tale. The pooches impress. They're always cute. Also, they're capable of digging up laughs. But Strays is a one-bark idea that's tossed around as repetitively as throwing a tennis ball to your fluffy pal: take a flick about adorable dogs, and talking ones at that, then make it crude and rude. Games of fetch do pop up in Strays, but via a version that no loving pet owner would ever want to play. This one is called "fetch and fuck", with stoner and constant masturbator Doug (Will Forte, I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson) doing the pitching. He isn't a kindly human companion to Reggie (voiced by Will Ferrell, Barbie). He's cruel and resentful after his girlfriend adopted the border terrier as a pupper, then left him when the dog exposed his cheating — and he insisted upon keeping the pooch purely out of spite. So, he constantly drives Reggie to various distant spots. He sends him running. As soon as the ball is in the air, Doug hightails it. The canine isn't supposed to follow him back, but does every single time, hence the expletive part of the pastime's name. With unwavering affection, plus the naivety to only see the good in his chosen person, Reggie thinks that it's all meant to be fun. Being abandoned in a city hours away, and meeting Boston terrier Bug (Jamie Foxx, They Cloned Tyrone), Australian shepherd Maggie (Isla Fisher, Wolf Like Me) and great dane Hunter (Randall Park, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania) while he's there, soon has Reggie realising the truth about his relationship with Doug. Cue Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar director Josh Greenbaum and American Vandal creator/writer Dan Perrault sending the pup on a revenge mission with his new dog squad trotting along to help. Really, cue a parade of canines-gone-wild antics, each instance more OTT than the last. Urinating on something to claim it as your own and humping a grimy outdoor couch are just the beginning. Getting intimate with a garden gnome, squirrel threesomes, tripping on mushrooms, trying to use Hunter's great member to escape from doggy jail and a steaming pile of poop jokes: they are as well. Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey, A Dog's Purpose, Beethoven, every family-friendly pooch flick, any treacly ode to human's best friend: Strays definitely isn't in their pack. Depending on your fondness for super-sweet dog films, that isn't a bad thing. Cat & Dogs, Doctor Dolittle, Marmaduke, Babe, Paddington: Strays doesn't join those talking-animal pictures either. Instead, as Greenbaum and Perrault riff on the fact that canines love doing everything that humans do, their feature has more in common with Sausage Party, Ted, Good Boys (not a dog movie) and The Happytime Murders. Taking something that's usually for all-ages audiences, then ensuring that it 100-percent isn't: that's the formula that Strays seeks as eagerly and forcefully as a tail-wagger sprinting after a hurled stick. Smearing straightforward gags about sex, drugs, crotches and bodily functions through a story about endearing pups isn't the film's best trait, even if that's the number-one approach and aim. Again, getting foul-mouthed and lewd with pooches is the entire concept and reason that the movie exists, but hitting the same beats over and over, then over and over some more, makes its 93-minute running time seem far longer than it is. Unsurprisingly, some comic bits are worn out quicker than a mutt's favourite chew toy. Strays is a better and funnier flick, however, when it's doing two things: leaning gleefully into the surreal and grounding its humour in perceptive insights into dog behaviour. Glorious silliness doesn't come as easily to Greenbaum as it should, though — Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar is one of the best absurdist comedies of the 2020s, and best comedies in general — but it leads to a few standout moments. One involves fireworks experienced from the canine perspective. Another brings in bunnies. Both are memorable (as are a winking mid-picture celebrity cameo that riffs on the dog-movie genre and the use of Miley Cyrus' 'Wrecking Ball' at a pivotal moment). Strays also isn't afraid to get dark; it might be as predictable overall as a dog licking a bone, dishing up exactly what audiences expect, but it largely craps all over schmaltz. It's less convincing when it's trying to skew deep, with musings on self-worth, emotional trauma, and folks who bring pets into their lives with selfish and attention-seeking motives well-meaning but treated flimsily. Perhaps it's fitting that Strays flits between perky (when it's bounding beyond the obvious) and sleepy (when it's happy chasing its own tail); IRL, the critters at its centre often do. Still, one thing can't be underestimated: the impact of the movie's voice work and animal cast. The wrong vocals would've left the film doing nothing but howling, and looking shoddy would've had it burying itself from frame one. Playing Reggie as an earnest child who navigates the world with curiosity and trust, Ferrell is basically in Elf mode, but it worked there and does the same here. Perfecting the pint-sized Bug's big-dog syndrome, Foxx is all swagger — while Fisher charms breezily and Park deadpans. And, even though it takes special-effects wizardry to make Strays' main quartet appear as if they're speaking, the real-life pups earn themselves ample treats. Although they still won't be winning any shiny trophies, they ensure that this hit-and-miss picture is just like people: better just by having dogs around.
In the Bram Stoker vampire novel that's inspired almost all other vampire novels, Dracula is undead. In popular culture since and forever, the fictional Transylvanian bloodsucker will never die. Regardless of his fate on the page back in 1897, the most-portrayed character in horror movies ever keeps baring his fangs on-screen, rising again and again like the sun that this creature of the night can never bask in. 2023 brings two new Dracula films, which isn't overly notable, but this crop of Stoker-influenced flicks doesn't simply retell the usual 126-year-old tale. Leaning into comedy and action, Renfield sunk its teeth in by giving the vampire's long-suffering familiar some love. Now the dread-dripping Dracula: Voyage of the Demeter hones in on one chapter of the book that started it all, detailing the captain's log from the neck-munching fiend's journey to London via ship. In print, this stint of seafaring isn't Dracula's main focus. In adaptations upon adaptations over the past century, sometimes it isn't even included — or, if it does pop up, it's often a montage or a passing mention. The watery trip glistens with horror-movie potential, however, boasting a specific setting, a captive group, and an ominous force stalking and slaying. Slasher films, haunted-house fare, Jaws, Alien: they've all fed on such scenarios. Dracula: Voyage of the Demeter has spent decades in various stages of development, cycling through a feast of various talents, but bringing this Dracula chapter to the screen was always a sound idea. While the end result doesn't star Noomi Rappace (You Won't Be Alone), Ben Kingsley (Daliland), Jude Law (Peter Pan & Wendy) or Viggo Mortensen (Thirteen Lives) as previously floated, and isn't directed by Robert Schwentke (The Captain, Allegiant), Marcus Nispel (Conan the Barbarian, Friday the 13th) or Neil Marshall (The Lair, Hellboy), a solid concept with eerie, moody and gory potential remains at its core. Leading instead: Corey Hawkins (In the Heights) as physician Clemens, Aisling Franciosi (The Nightingale) as stowaway Anna and Liam Cunningham (Game of Thrones) as Captain Eliot. The former hops onto the latter's ship in Eastern Europe, where a promised job falls through due to his race, forcing a pivot onto the Demeter's crew to return to England. Clemens isn't the only new boarding, with the vessel also welcoming 50 unmarked crates from the Carpathian Mountains. Given that the film is named Dracula: Voyage of the Demeter Down Under — elsewhere, it's known as just The Last Voyage of the Demeter — there's no surprises about what's among the cargo. So, as initially told in Dracula's seventh chapter, in the epistolary format of letters, journals and clippings that Stoker's tome deployed across the entire novel, the key contents of those mysterious wooden chests soon begins offing fellow seafarers. As it relishes gothic-horror chills and, later, gruesome blood spills, there's a full-circle air to the latest film by Trollhunter, The Autopsy of Jane Doe and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark director André Øvredal. Of course Dracula: Voyage of the Demeter feels like Alien but Dracula, or Halloween with the nape-chomping Count — all visions of slaughter at sea owe his acclaimed text's 'The Dailygraph' segment a debt, and all slasher flicks owe Stoker's book as a whole. Bragi F Schut (Escape Room) and Zak Olkewicz's (Bullet Train) screenplay isn't quaking about those similarities. It isn't afraid of unfurling a narrative with zero tension about its outcome, either, because Dracula's time in London is already that well-covered. Indeed, after commencing with the end that's so deeply established, the bulk of the movie arrives as flashbacks, as lifted from Eliot's log, of the infernal odyssey that eventuates whenever "a man, tall and thin, and ghastly pale" — aka a Nosferatu-esque Dracula (Javier Botet, His House) — awakes from coffin. Dracula: Voyage of the Demeter's script is an invitation to its filmmaker, then: take this setup, with its familiar situation, famous monster and foregone conclusion, and make it an old-school frightfest through atmosphere, execution and investment in characters. Øvredal largely obliges. Exactly what the audience knows will happen does — regardless of how intimate you are with the source material, or past Drac outings, or not — but this isn't a mere water-treading viewing experience in the Norwegian director's hands. How creepily and compellingly this story is splashed across the screen is as crucial as the plot details. So is the film's willingness to let its antagonist terrify, plus its eagerness to flesh out its pivotal humans. Enlisting Botet, who was also a menacing presence in Mama, Crimson Peak, IT, Insidious: The Last Key and Slender Man, helps. In avoiding relegating Clemens, Anna, Eliot, his grandson Toby (Woody Norman, C'mon C'mon) and first mate Wojchek (David Dastmalchian, Oppenheimer) to just prey and pawns, the rest of the cast also assists. The ins and outs of Schut and Olkewicz's script see the science-minded Clemens set sail, clash with the Demeter's crew over their faith in myth and superstition — they're also not fussed about his attire or smooth hands — then try to hunt down the creature that's leaving a red-streaked body count. The film's narrative also chronicles Anna's shock appearance mid-voyage, as well as a cat-and-mouse game as the living endeavour to stop the undead. Øvredal's committed direction, plus discerning cinematography (by Mortal's Roman Osin and The Ice Road's Tom Stern), production design (Edward Thomas, Escape Room: Tournament of Champions) and composing (Bear McCreary, Foundation), showers that doomed journey with unease. As the helmer's filmography already attests, he knows the horror genre's basics inside out. And, he's equally aware that textured performances leave a mark, whether Hawkins is conveying why believing in the rational is so important to Clemens, or Franciosi is expressing pain and perseverance, or Cunningham embodying down-with-the-ship dutifulness. As it charts its carnage-filled cruise, Dracula: Voyage of the Demeter isn't an origin story but an in-between story. "In-between" sums up the picture overall, too. It lingers in the middle of Hammer flicks and Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula. It is gleefully keen on bloodshed, but also frequently refined in look and feel. Øvredal's feature is enthusiastic about staking its own claim; however, as too much does lately, it goes to great efforts to spark a follow-up — and attempt to resurrect Universal's monster movies after 2014's Dracula Untold and 2017's The Mummy failed. (Consider Renfield and Dracula: Voyage of the Demeter's swift-in-succession releases the studio giving itself two new tastes.) This trip with ol' Drac never sinks, yet it also doesn't truly soar. For the bloodsucker himself over this particular journey, that's a welcome outcome. For viewers witnessing a literary masterpiece given a different big-screen spin after its packed history, it's enough to bite into.
Jaws, but bigger. Jurassic Park but sharks. Like a prehistoric underwater predator scooping up a heap of beachgoers in one hefty mouthful, describing what The Meg and its sequel Meg 2: The Trench are each aiming to be is easy. Ridiculous big-screen fun that sets Jason Statham (Fast X) against multiple megalodons, his scowl as shiny as their razor-sharp teeth: they're the type of waters that this creature-feature franchise also wants to paddle in. Since debuting in cinemas in 2018, all things The Meg have always had a seriousness problem, however. They're at their best when they're also at their silliest, but they're rarely as entertainingly ludicrous as they're desperate to be. This five-years-later follow-up might task Statham with shooting harpoons while riding a jet ski at a tourist-trap holiday destination called Fun Island — and also busting out the line "see ya later, chum", which lands with such a sense of self-satisfaction that it feels like the entire reason that the movie even exists — but such gleeful preposterousness is about as common as a herbivore with a meg's massive chompers. Again based on one of author Steve Alten's books — he's penned seven so far, so more flicks are likely — Meg 2: The Trench doesn't just want to ape the Jurassic series. It does exactly that overtly and unsubtly from the outset, but this film is also happy to brazenly treat multiple movies from a few decades back as fuel for its choppy antics. When the feature starts, it's 65 million years ago, dinosaurs demonstrate the cretaceous period's food chain, then a megalodon shows who's boss from the water. Obviously, life will find a way to bring some of this sequence's non-meg critters into the present day. Next comes a dive in The Abyss' slipstream, before embracing being a Jaws clone again — even shouting out to Jaws 2 in dialogue — but with a Piranha vibe. Before it's all over, Meg 2: The Trench also flails in Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus' direction, just with a visibly larger budget. Leading the charge on-screen is Statham's Jonas Taylor, who also scores an early eco-warrior Bond stint. When his character is reintroduced, he's on a container ship in the Philippine Sea taking down pirates that are dumping radioactive waste. His next stop is the Oceanic Institute run out of Hainan in China, where the world's only megalodon in captivity lives — and where Jonas' friend Jiuming (Wu Jing, The Wandering Earth), uncle to teenager Meiying (Sophia Cai, Mr Corman), claims that he has the creature called Haiqi trained. Viewers of the first film might remember that oceanography runs in Meiying's blood, but her mother has been killed off between movies because Li Bingbing (Transformers: Age of Extinction) didn't return for the second production. Hence Jiuming's arrival, and also Taylor playing father figure to a kid he forbids from accompanying him on his latest deep-dive research trip. Meiying stows away, naturally. Off-screen, British filmmaker Ben Wheatley makes the leap to the Hollywood action fold with Meg 2: The Trench, a move that isn't as wild as it initially might seem — just like everything in his big-budget B-movie. Wheatley knows black comedy, with his 2012 film Sightseers an absolute masterclass in it. With High-Rise and Free Fire, he knew how to bring a spectacle, too. Alas, the director that also crafted Down Terrace, Kill List, A Field in England and Happy New Year, Colin Burstead, flitting between the dark and the trippy along the way, plus thrillers and dramedies, is saddled with a script that couldn't be more routine. Explaining his approach to problem-solving, including while submersed 25,000 feet below sea level in the Pacific, Jonas tells Meiying that "we do what's in front of us, then we do the next thing". Was that returning screenwriters Jon Hoeber, Erich Hoeber and Dean Georgaris' own mantra as well? Whatever is in front of Jonas, and audiences, usually involves a meg. When he descends into the titular ditch with Jiuming, Meiying and their team — among them is The Meg alumnus Page Kennedy (The Upshaws) as DJ, the forceful comic relief who has definitely seen Jaws' sequel — of course oversized sharks that died out millions of years ago IRL are lurking. When Jonas finds a rogue mining outfit pilfering the deep, of course stopping its ruthless leader Montes (Sergio Persis-Mencheta, Snowfall) becomes all the more complicated with megalodons as a constant threat, too. Wheatley wrings what tension he can out of a bottom-of-the-ocean walk in Iron Man-meets-RoboCop suits as hungry creatures linger, and also out of his riff on The Thing, Alien and every horror film set in an isolated space when Meg 2: The Trench's heroes get to the miners' base. What he can't do is make the movie's various contrived parts resemble a coherent whole, skew engagingly campy or feel like anything more than a knockoff of so many other flicks in The Meg's clothing. Another feat that Wheatley's turn at the franchise's helm fails to bite into: convincing special effects. While viewers don't go to a film that has basically swapped "you're gonna need a bigger boat" for "we're gonna fight a bigger shark" for the realism, Meg 2: The Trench's CGI is distractingly subpar. Anything busting out dinos not just post-Jurassic Park, but after Prehistoric Planet and its second season, is always going to struggle if their critters can't wow. Although the megs hardly fare any better, frequently focusing on a big fin sticking out of the water still remains as helpful a tactic as it did when Steven Spielberg defined the shark genre. Getting audiences terrified, perturbed or even just a little on-edge, though? Even when the obligatory jump-scares pop up, no one is leaving this flick afraid to go into the water. Whether he's starring in several Guy Ritchie films, turning The Transporter into a franchise, making a couple of Crank and The Mechanic movies, or showing up in six Fast and Furious-related entries so far, Statham does love repeating himself. Meg 2: The Trench doesn't ask him to do anything more than he did the last time that he faced sea-dwelling fears — but even he's just going through the motions. The rest of the cast, returning and new alike, are as disposable as anyone enjoying a dip to a meg. As trusty offsider Mac, Cliff Curtis (Avatar: The Way of Water) leaves the biggest impression among an ensemble that also spans Skyler Samuels (Aurora Teagarden Mysteries), Melissanthi Mahut (The Sandman), Sienna Guillory (Silo) and Whoopie Van Raam (Counterpart). Not that anyone is required to try, but no one can stop Meg 2: The Trench's most apt line from proving oh-so-true: "this is some dumb shit".
Prepare to step inside the mind of a cinematic genius. It's a big call, sure, but it's true when it comes to David Lynch. No one makes movies or TV shows quite like the man who brought us Eraserhead, Blue Velvet and a little series called Twin Peaks, and we mean no one — no matter how hard anyone else keeps trying. Don't just take our word for it, though. At Cinema Nova's LYNCHPINS: Essential David Lynch, film lovers can experience his movie marvels for themselves. The Carlton venue is diving into the director's distinctive audiovisual catalogue, screening six of his features on various dates and at different times throughout August and September. On the agenda: Eraserhead, the film that started it all and still has no equal in the mindblowing stakes; Lynch's moving, thoughtful and eight-time Oscar-nominated The Elephant Man; the twisty thrills (and ace 90s soundtrack) of Lost Highway; and Inland Empire, aka the flick the director famously wanted Laura Dern to win an Oscar for so badly that he campaigned on Hollywood Boulevard with a live cow, showing here in a fully restored version. Then there's two Kyle MacLachlan-starring stunners: Blue Velvet, which will ensure that you'll never look at white picket fences the same way ever again; and Twin Peaks' exceptional horror sequel/prequel Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. BYO damn fine cup of coffee to the latter. Each film in the LYNCHPINS: Essential David Lynch lineup opens on a Thursday, then treats viewers to daily sessions.
Before it busts out licking lucky cats, K-pop-style Cardi B covers, cocaine enemas, threesome injuries and intimate tattoos, Joy Ride begins with a punch. For most of the movie, Audrey Sullivan (Ashley Park, Beef) and Lolo Chen (Sherry Cola, Good Trouble) are nearing 30, travelling in China and going on a wild journey in a gleefully raucous comedy. In the 1998-set prologue in White Falls, Washington, though, they're five-year-olds (debutants Lennon Yee and Milana Wan) first meeting, being taunted by a racist playground bully and responding with the outgoing Lolo's fist. Crazy Rich Asians and Raya and the Last Dragon screenwriter Adele Lim uses her directorial debut's opening scene not just to start a fast and firm friendship, but to establish the film's tone, sense of humour and, crucially, its willingness to fight. Joy Ride will ultimately get sentimental; however, this is a movie that beats up cultural prejudices and stereotypes by letting its four main female and non-binary Asian American characters grapple with them while being complicated and chaotic. Hollywood should be well past representation being such a noteworthy factor. That should've happened long before Bridesmaids and Bachelorette gave The Hangover's template a ladies-led spin more than a decade ago, and prior to Girls Trip spending time four Black women on a raucous weekend away six years back. Reality proves otherwise, sadly, so Joy Ride openly addresses the discrimination and pigeonholing slung Audrey, Lolo, and their pals Kat (Everything Everywhere All At Once Oscar-nominee Stephanie Hsu) and Deadeye's (comedian and movie first-timer Sabrina Wu) ways — and in Audrey's case, after being adopted as a baby by the white Sullivans (The Recruit's David Denman and Bridesmaids' co-writer Annie Mumolo), internalised. With its booze- and sex-fuelled antics, Lim's film could've simply been formulaically entertaining, just with Asian American characters in Asia. It certainly doesn't hold back with its raunchy setpieces. But it's a better and more thoughtful feature because it engages with the diasporic experience; "I'm just a garbage American who only speaks English," Audrey chides herself, which the picture she's in unpacks. The full Joy Ride equation, then, also treads in The Farewell and Everything Everywhere All At Once's impressive and rightly acclaimed footsteps. Tellingly, Lim and her co-screenwriters Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao, both of whom boast Awkwafina Is Nora From Queens on their resumes, originally had Joy Fuck Club as their film's working title. Also revealing: that Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg's production company Point Grey Pictures is behind the movie, after previously giving cinemas flicks like Bad Neighbours and its sequel, This Is the End, The Night Before, Sausage Party, Blockers, Long Shot and Good Boys. Getting culturally specific; dismantling Asian cliches; examining identity, belonging and displacement; being hilariously bawdy: Joy Ride always feels like the sum of these easily spotted parts, but it also always feels genuine. As children, Audrey and Lolo are thrust together due to their shared heritage — "are you Chinese?," the Sullivans ask the Chens (The Midnight Club's Kenneth Liu and Platonic's Debbie Fan) in that introductory sequence, which inspires a shared glance that says everything — but they're a chalk-and-cheese pair personality-wise. Before the young Lolo smacks their tormentor, Audrey is cowering. As adults, Lolo makes sex-positive art riffing on Chinese culture that hasn't yet brought her success, while Audrey is a fast-rising lawyer eyeing a promotion at a firm filled with white men (such as Don't Worry Darling's Timothy Simons). Lolo lives in Audrey's garage, is steeped in her culture and content being herself. Audrey names Mumford & Sons and The National as her favourite bands, and can list Succession characters instantly. As they head to China so that Audrey can close a big deal, with Lolo along for the ride as her personal translator, the latter is excited about seeing family, while the former is guilty of making wary assumptions about what the trip will be like. When Lolo's K-pop-obsessed cousin Deadeye joins them at the airport, it's the first surprise that's thrown Audrey's way. The bickering between Lolo and Kat, Audrey's college roommate-turned- Chinese soap-opera star, over who's truly her BFF — that she easily foresees. This wouldn't be a wild getaway comedy if there weren't more bolts out of the blue coming at Audrey, of course, kicking off with a drink-heavy night trying to get her client Chao (Ronny Chieng, M3GAN) to sign, which leads to a cross-country quest to find her birth mother. Drugs, sex, vomit, a faux band, 'WAP', a distracted basketball team, vagina-view camerawork: that all follows. So does a fateful train ride that's utter pandemonium in a completely different way to Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One, and Kat trying to hide her between-the-sheets past from her very Christian fiancé (Desmond Chiam, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier). Lim weaves Audrey's journey of acceptance and discovery, embracing her background and realising the eager-to-please and assimilate part that she's unwittingly played since childhood, throughout a zippy and brightly shot madcap romp of a movie. And, she largely finds the right balance — including as Lolo refuses to be anyone but herself; the blunt, introverted but caring Deadeye yearns to be liked for being themself; and Kat struggles with knowing how to be true to her real self beyond the demure, polite and dutiful front that she's been putting on professionally and personally. Along the way, Joy Ride revels in a candy-coloured dance number, lets Asian men be ripped and lusted after, and, yes, gets mawkish when it comes time to tie everything up neatly. Sometimes it's sidesplittingly funny, sometimes it's only eagerly trying to be, but it's aptly never happy slipping into one easy category. At their best when Joy Ride is either at its most manic and outrageous, or its weightiest and intelligent, Park, Cola, Hsu and Wu are a dream cast. If the film wants to stick to The Hangover setup by sparking sequels, teaming its core quartet up again and again would be keenly welcomed after this first go-around. Park has the trickiest and straightest role, Cola the brassiest, Hsu the lewdest and Wu the most awkward — and each nails the task while giving the film a fleshed-out, multi-faceted, smart, striving, relatably imperfect crew, and actively dispelling the idea that to be Asian American is to be a monoculture. Indeed, their energy and authenticity, and Lim's behind the lens, sometimes eclipses Joy Ride's jokes — and that couldn't be a better problem to have.
Pasta and parmesan are one of Italian cuisine's perfect pairings. Eat the former without the latter, and your tastebuds will know the difference. And while sprinkling your spaghetti with fine shavings of hard cheese is all well and good (and delicious), that's nothing compared to devouring a bowl of pasta that has been prepared inside a parmesan wheel. If it sounds like all of your culinary dreams come true, that's because it is — and it's the dish in the spotlight at Cucinetta's returning Parmesan Wheel Week. After a swag of successful previous events in past years, the South Yarra restaurant is bringing this cheesy situation back for a second time in 2023 alone. Why? Other than the perfectly excellent answer "why not?", it's because the eatery is celebrating its tenth anniversary. Once again, this special means serving up the Italian specialty pasta cacio e pepe straight out of a wheel of 24-month Parmigiano Reggiano. And, despite the name, the $36.90 special is actually running across two full weeks. Given that cacio e pepe is a pasta concoction made with parmesan and pepper — think: fancier, tastier mac 'n' cheese — the results promise quite the cheesy meal. The dish will be available at Cucinetta for lunch from 12–3pm and dinner from 5pm–close between Monday, May 22–Sunday, June 4. We'd tell you to arrive hungry, but we're sure that just thinking about it already has you feeling ravenous.
Winter and comfort foods always go hand in hand, but fans of doughnuts should find the start of the frosty season particularly delicious. Each year, to kick off June, National Doughnut Day arrives. And, when the date hits, free round orbs are often on the menu. In 2023, on Friday, June 2, Donut King will be handing out freebies — and keeping Australians happy with their eponymous blend of sweets and carbs. The chain is known for its hot cinnamon doughnuts, and that's exactly what it'll be giving away at every store Australia-wide. Donut King hasn't advised exactly how many doughnuts are up for grabs, and it is a while-stocks-last affair. That said, the brand is intending to serve up a whole heap of its number-one treat to customers in exchange for zero cash, beginning at 1am AEST — if that's when your local store opens — and running through until 11.59pm AEST. The big caveat, other than the first-in-best-dressed rule: there's a limit of one free hot cinnamon doughnut per person. Also, you do have to hit up a Donut King shop in-person, with the giveaway not available for deliveries. To snag yourself a freebie, folks in Melbourne can make a date everywhere from Northcote and Sunshine to The Pines and Southland Westfield. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Donut King (@donutking_au)
David Lynch's films and television shows should never be far from a screen, but it's been 17 years since his last new movie and six since he brought back Twin Peaks. Thankfully, the inimitable filmmaker is a favourite of retrospective programmers. Lynch's work isn't always gracing a cinema somewhere around Melbourne, but it's rarely far away in all of its wild and wonderful glory. Movies don't get much more Lynchian than Mulholland Drive, which is the latest of the director's masterpieces to get a-flickering again, this time at The Capitol on Tuesday, July 18. This shimmering neo-noir is showing as part of the latest entry in The Best Films You've Never Seen series, this time badged A Night of Surrealist Cinema. Hopefully you have indeed watched this Los Angeles-set tale starring Naomi Watts as a wide-eyed aspiring actor, and hopefully you've even caught it on the silver screen — but whether you have or not, this is a golden opportunity. It's the film that scored Lynch his third Best Director Oscar nomination, plus a Best Director win at Cannes. In dreams, it lingers long after you've seen it. And, heading along to this 6.30pm session will only cost you $10. Something that you genuinely mightn't have seen before is on the bill with Mulholland Drive: Maya Deren's experimental avant-garde 1943 short Meshes of the Afternoon. Both titles were named in the top 20 in the recent British Film Institute Sight and Sound Greatest Films of All Time poll, if you need any more motivation. [caption id="attachment_905946" align="alignnone" width="1920"] NAGC/FMC[/caption]
Spinning tops at the ready — it's time to enter the dream within a dream that is Christopher Nolan's filmography. With Oppenheimer, the British writer/director's 12th feature, on its way to the big screen in July, Pentridge Cinema is dedicating its regular Palace Encore! retro screening program to his flicks for two action-packed months. Memento, The Prestige, Inception, Interstellar, Dunkirk, Tenet — they're all on the lineup, with the season running from Friday, May 12–Friday, July 14. Largely, the sessions take place at 6.30pm on Friday nights and cost $10 for Palace members and $15 otherwise, but there is one big exception: a day-long marathon of The Dark Knight Trilogy (aka Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises) from 11am on Saturday, June 17, where you'll pay $25–30 for grim caped-crusader antics. At Beyond the Infinite: The Influences and Films of Christopher Nolan, as the program is called, there's another dream layer to plunge into as well. Palace is also celebrating the films that've left an imprint on Nolan and his work, which opens up the door to a couple of other masterpieces. Everyone should see Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey on the silver screen at least once. The same goes for Ridley Scott's OG Blade Runner, too. And, also on the ten-week bill is a jump back almost a century with 1927's highly influential German expressionist gem Metropolis.
Things have already been heating up in the kitchen at Prahran's Firebird this year, with celebrated Sunda alum Nabil Ansari joining the crew as Head Chef. But they're about to get even more fiery during Melbourne Food & Wine Festival when this rising-star chef hosts a two-night dinner series dedicated to the Southeast Asian and Indian flavours of his heritage. Held across three nightly sittings (5.45pm, 7pm, 8.15pm) from Monday, March 27–Tuesday, March 28, the six-course feasts will make a hero of Firebird's famed custom wood-fired grill. Brought to life over charcoal and showcasing a clever mix of flavours, the menu's set to feature punchy plates like duck samosas paired with a medjool date chutney, smoked scallops done with salmon roe and yellow coconut curry, and a slow-cooked lamb clay pot biryani. Tickets to Ansari's dinner come in at $150, which also gets you a cocktail on arrival. Firebird's usual drinks list will be available if you fancy adding on any further bevs, too. Images: Carmen Zammit.
It took 30 years, plus a warp pipe from live-action to animation, but Super Mario Bros finally gained a cinematic mushroom. While these are peak product-to-screen times — see also: The Last of Us, Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves, Tetris and Air, plus the upcoming Barbie, BlackBerry and latest Transformers flick — Nintendo's plumber siblings were long flushed out of movies thanks to their underperforming first outing. 1993's Bob Hoskins (Snow White and the Huntsman) and John Leguizamo (Violent Night)-starring film, the first-ever live-action video game film, isn't terrible. It followed its own dark path and hit its own wild blocks, something that stands out even more now that slavish obsession to intellectual property and franchise-building is king. If 2023's The Super Mario Bros Movie is a response to its predecessor, it's a happily dutiful one, doing its utmost to copy the video game. The strongest feeling it inspires: making viewers want to bust out their old NES or SNES or Game Boy, or emulators of any of them, or Nintendo's current Switch, and mash buttons as the red-capped, moustachioed, overalls-wearing Mario. These are also peak product-to-screen-to-purchase times; selling more Super Mario Bros, Mario Kart and Super Smash Bros games is a clear and obvious aim of The Super Mario Bros Movie. To do that, the film truly is as enthusiastic about recreating its various source materials as Mario has been about collecting coins, completing levels and saving Princess Peach since way back in his 8-bit days. Under directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic, creators of Teen Titans Go!, the animation looks like it's been ported straight from the console — a feat that's hardly unexpected given that it's all shiny pixels. It's also unsurprising due to Nintendo's recent success in mirroring the games IRL in Universal's Osaka and Hollywood theme parks. The Super Mario Bros Movie will help sell more tickets to those, too. In those impressive images, Italian Americans Mario (voiced by Chris Pratt, Thor: Love and Thunder) and Luigi (Charlie Day, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia) essentially find themselves in the Super Mario Bros version of The Wizard of Oz. Like the 90s flick, they're also transported to another realm where a villainous creature lusts for power— Bowser (Jack Black, Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood) here, with an army of the turtle-like koopas doing his bidding. A sewer flood whisks Mario and Luigi out of their own world, after they try to fix it to drum up customers for their plumbing business. On the other side of the tunnel, Mario lands in the Mushroom Kingdom and Luigi ends up Bowser's prisoner. Cue a quest, including along the rainbow road, to reunite the brothers, stop Bowser and keep him away from Peach (Anya Taylor-Joy, The Menu) — who definitely isn't a damsel in distress, but the target of Bowser's obsessive affections. Screenwriter Matthew Fogel (Minions: The Rise of Gru) has kept The Super Mario Bros Movie's story slight, just as Horvath and Jelenic ensure that the tone stays light. Still, while it might star Pratt, there's no The Lego Movie-level smarts, satire and hilarity on offer. Instead, the fun-enough picture is packed with as many nods to the games as it can possibly fit in — and to as many games as it can manage. It's been four decades since Mario Bros initially hit arcades, spinning off from Mario's 1981 introduction in the first Donkey Kong, so there's much to reference. The film brings in the big gorilla (Seth Rogen, The Fabelmans) and his simian pals (Wednesday's Fred Armisen voices Cranky Kong). It gets speeding along that beloved rainbow road, with shells flying and Mad Max: Fury Road coming to mind. The list goes on and cuts far deeper than the obvious; it isn't accurate to say it's full of Easter eggs, though, because it's simply a Super Mario Bros movie stacked with attention to Super Mario Bros detail. Released beforehand, but still a sight to see within the complete flick, Mario's arrival in the Mushroom Kingdom and his introductory tour by the mushroom-headed Toad (Keegan-Michael Key, Schmigadoon!) is a visual treasure trove. When Peach has him prove he's up to the Bowser-battling mission by hopping through an obstacle course that mirrors Super Mario Bros' levels, it's also spot on. Before that in Brooklyn, rushing to a job gets the side-scrolling treatment — and it's an entertainingly playful touch. Nintendo composer Koji Kondo's famous tunes are worked and interpreted by composer Brian Tyler (Scream VI), too, and well. Of course, a game-to-movie effort can't just splash around familiar sights and sounds, actively court nostalgia, and call it all a film. This one doesn't, but the plot remains noticeably thin, including in its siblings-stick-together theme. It's also indebted to the Minions franchise in much of Bowser and the Koopas' storyline. That's animation house Illumination cribbing from itself, given it's behind Despicable Me and its sequels and continues, and now this. If the bright, bouncy, vivid and immersive imagery is The Super Mario Bros Movie's main power-up, which it is, it's still no invincibility star. Neither is the fast pace, aka the default mode for most family-friendly animated fare that isn't made by Pixar, Studio Ghibli or Wolfwalkers' Cartoon Saloon, and where the key focus is on throwing constant chaos at kids so that they don't get distracted. And when the stock-standard needle-drops start, because every all-ages-friendly movie has to jam in recognisable songs like 'Holding Out for a Hero' and 'Take on Me' like it's a jukebox musical — a lazy and grating genre staple that won't go away — there's basic Spotify playlist vibes. It might've sparked the Gentleminions fad among cinemagoers who grew up watching yellow babbling critters, but Minions: The Rise of Gru did the same. Cosplaying in red or green outfits to The Super Mario Bros Movie, which'll happen seeing that all things Mario are that adored, won't patch over the template at work here either. Although it doesn't seem like it when the picture presses start, Horvath and Jelenic are well-aware that they can't have Pratt let's-a-going his way through the film with a stereotypical accent, and don't. They're also comically knowing about it. That said, his casting is neither a coin box nor a banana peel — but his co-stars are winningly chosen. The expressive and energetic Day helps make the case for a big-screen Luigi's Mansion outing to come next. Taylor-Joy gives Peach pluck and determination, on par with the script's commitment to make the character anything but someone who needs rescuing. Key is lively and squeaky, Black growls and pines for Peach with Tenacious D-style glee and Rogan is audibly having a ball. And, while this can't be said about the bulk of this endearingly loving but supremely by-the-numbers film, that's something that The Super Mario Bros Movie delivers but the games can't.
There's no shortage of heartbreak in Till, a shattering drama about the abduction, torture and lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955. Clemency writer/director Chinonye Chukwu tells of a boy's tragic death, a mother's pain and anger, and a country's shame and trauma — and how all three pushed along America's 20th-century civil rights movement. Heartache lingers in the needless loss of life. Fury swells at the abhorrent racism on display, including in the justifications offered by the unrepentant perpetrators. Despair buzzes in the grief, personal and national alike, that hangs heavy from the second that Emmett is dragged away in the night. Fury seethes, too, because an atrocious murder like this demands justice and change, neither of which was ever going to be easy to secure given the time and place. Indeed, the US-wide Emmett Till Antilynching Act making lynching a federal hate crime only became law in March 2022. Heartbreak builds in and bursts through Till from the outset — and in sadly everyday situations. Emmett, nicknamed Bo by his family, is played as a lively and joyful teen by the impressive Jalyn Hall (Space Jam: A New Legacy). He's confident and cheery, as his mother Mamie Till-Mobley (Danielle Deadwyler, Station Eleven) has lovingly raised him to be in Chicago. But even department-store shopping for a trip to the Deep South is coloured by the threat of discrimination. So, as his departure to see relatives gets nearer, Mamie utters a few words of advice. She's stern and urgent, trying to impart to him the importance of adhering to Mississippi's unspoken rules. She implores him not to do anything that could be construed as looking at white people the wrong way, to apologise profusely and instantly whenever he has to, and to heed the different set of norms. "Be small down there," she says — and it's one of the movie's many crushing moments. More devastation follows, in a film that wouldn't need to exist in a better world but is essential viewing in this one. While stopping at a grocery store in the sharecropper town of Money, Emmett talks to white shopkeeper Carolyn Bryant (Haley Bennett, Cyrano) — a fateful incident with specifics that've long been disputed since, as seen in infuriating testimony in the feature's later court scene. Chukwu depicts Emmett being chatty and charming, commenting that Bryant looks like a movie star. She responds by heading outside to get a pistol. Emmett's cousins and friends are frightened, a reaction that proves well-founded when Bryant's husband and brother-in-law arrive at Mamie's uncle's (John Douglas Thompson, The 355) door a few evenings later. The next time that the film's central teenager is seen, he's a horrendously beaten and barely recognisable corpse. Scripted by Chukwu with producers Keith Beauchamp (director of 2005 documentary The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till) and Michael Reilly, Till isn't called Emmett or Bo, and isn't just the murdered boy's story — because Mamie was determined to make her heartbreak mean something. Accordingly, the movie devotes much of its running time to the aftermath, as Emmett's mother turns unspeakable sorrow into two quests: to try to hold the culprits responsible and to do whatever she needs to stop this from occurring to anyone else. Chukwu's film is sincere and clear-eyed about Mamie's courageous fight and the fortitude it takes, but it never veers away from the loss and hurt behind it. This is a portrait of a woman who became an activist icon, and also an ode to someone who was committed to ensuring that her boy's senseless killing wouldn't be excused or forgotten. When Till does see Emmett again after he's ripped from his family, the feature is careful — but also faithful to Mamie's actions. Chukwu smartly and sensitively chooses not to show the violence that Emmett was subjected to. When farmhand Willie Reed (Darian Rolle, Hard Drive) hears screams from a barn, it's deeply chilling without anyone needing to witness a single blow. And Mamie's cries when she greets her son's coffin are unsurprisingly hard to shake. But America and the globe were confronted with exactly what this crime looks like when Mamie insisted on holding an open-casket funeral, a move that Till both dramatises and copies. Chukwu is still restrained, however, never making a spectacle out of Emmett's maimed face and body. And, she's aware that watching how Mamie and others respond to the bludgeoned boy — seeing their faces crumple in distress and torment, as they naturally do — is equally as powerful. In fact, Chukwu and cinematographer Bobby Bukowski (Archive 81) can barely bring themselves to peer away from Deadwyler, who stuns in frame after frame. With both subtlety and potency, she's the picture of nervous, protective worry even before Emmett leaves — a venture that Mamie is against but her mother Alma (Whoopi Goldberg, Harlem) believes will help him know his roots — and, when he's away, conveys the motherly fear that something awful will eventuate in every look and gesture. Then, when the worst does come, Deadwyler is phenomenal in showing how Mamie summons up strength from enduring such horror. Till is a film of mourning, but it's also a movie about galvanising that mourning. While awards bodies have been woefully inconsistent with recognising Deadwyler's exceptional performance, with the BAFTAs and Screen Actors Guild offering nominations but the Golden Globes and Oscars overlooking her entirely, this is a haunting portrayal. The only Black woman employed by the US Air Force's Chicago office when Till begins, as well as a widow and a single mother, there's more to Mamie than living every mum's nightmare and crusading afterwards — and although that isn't the focus of Chukwu, Beauchamp and Reilly's screenplay, Till finds ways to layer in crucial detail. How rich the film appears, especially when it's observing Mamie, Emmett and their modest but happy life in its opening chapter, is a particularly pivotal touch. Amid the dread that Mamie patently feels about Emmett's trip, and the foreboding the audience shares as well, there's such warmth radiating from the screen early on. There's such vibrance, too, because that's the existence she had worked hard to give to her child — one she knows likely wouldn't have been possible in the south. In that and every way it can be, Till is a film about love first and foremost, even when its true tale is so heartbreakingly and irrevocably altered by hate.
Punching has never been what matters most in the Creed movies, no matter how fast and furiously fists frequently fly. One of the key things that's always set this boxing franchise apart — with its first instalment landing in 2015 and sequel Creed II hitting in 2018 — is its focus on character and emotion first and foremost, including favouring both above going round for round in the ring. Blows are traded, obviously. Bouts are fought, bruises inflicted, bones broken and titles won. But the Creed saga has kept swinging again and again, leading to latest instalment Creed III, because it's still about its namesake, who he is as a person, and his feelings, demons and conflicts. When you have Michael B Jordan (Just Mercy) leading a series — even when it's a part of the broader Rocky series, or perhaps especially when that's the case — you give him the room to dig deep. You also give him weighty material to bear, as well as the space to bare Adonis 'Donnie' Creed's soul. Jordan gives himself that room, weight and space in Creed III, in the actor's first stint as a director. Notching up a ninth chapter for the overall saga that dates back to 1976's three-time Oscar-winner Rocky, this is also the first film to sport either that character or Creed's moniker but not feature Sylvester Stallone on-camera — or his involvement beyond a producer credit. Creed III is all the better for Rocky Balboa's absence, despite Stallone turning in his best performance yet in the initial Creed film. Understanding what it means to move on and openly unpacking what that truly entails is something else this franchise-within-a-franchise has long gotten right. So, Donnie has moved on from struggling with his father's legacy, and from his need to live in the past. He has another date with history, but Jordan and screenwriters Keenan Coogler (Space Jam: A New Legacy) and Zach Baylin (King Richard) — with a story also credited to the original Creed's director Ryan Coogler (Black Panther: Wakanda Forever) — aren't just mindlessly repeating the series' pattern. Creed III begins by going back to where Donnie's story started on-screen — actually, by venturing even further back, meeting him as an idolising teen (Thaddeus J Mixson, The Wonder Years). It's 2002, he lives in a group home, and the slightly older Damian 'Dame' Anderson (Spence Moore II, AP Bio) is a best friend as close as a brother, his mentor, and also a boxing prodigy. But a night showered in glory turns traumatic and violent, ending with Dame being incarcerated for the best part of two decades. Jump to the film's present, where Donnie has thrown in the gloves but remains tied to his chosen sport thanks to his Los Angeles boxing gym, plus managing a stable of champions and hopefuls. Jump, too, to Dame (Jonathan Majors, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania) resurfacing fresh out of prison, wanting not just to reconnect but a title shot. The Rocky and Creed world sure does love an underdog. That's Dame, with only adolescent boxing achievements on his resume, but a certainty that he should challenge Donnie-managed reigning victor Felix Chavez (IRL pro boxer Jose Benavidez) for the belt. Even with plenty of its attention floating like a butterfly to the past, and stinging like a bee in what it sees, the movie wouldn't progress from there, of course, if its titular figure could himself resist the little guy — in the sport's hierarchy, not in stature. A hallmark of all things Rocky and Creed has always been giving the up-and-comer a go, as happened with Balboa and as he provided Donnie. So, true to the template but never only making itself about that tried-and-tested template, Creed III follows suit. This threequel-slash-ninequel isn't handing over the spotlight to its latest contender, though, no matter how magnetic and compelling Majors reliably proves (see also: The Last Black Man in San Francisco, Da 5 Bloods, Lovecraft Country and The Harder They Fall). He's Hollywood's current go-to for new villains in third efforts, and impressively so — particularly against the fellow heavyweight acting talent Jordan — but it's a touch unfortunate that Creed III drops in such short succession after the third Ant-Man rather than giving his efforts in both time to breathe. Inevitably, getting Jordan and Majors facing off in the ring, and getting Donnie back in the ring to do so, is a matter of when not if. The script obliges after Dame plays nice with Donnie's musician spouse Bianca (Tessa Thompson, Thor: Love and Thunder) and daughter Amara (Mila Davis-Kent, The Resident), who is deaf, but turns on his childhood pal on dime when he gets a taste of success and years of festering resentment bleeds out. Jordan directs with tension, intensity, energy, heft and a welcome willingness to get trippy with fight scenes, as aided by cinematographer Kramer Morgenthau (The Many Saints of Newark) — and with pace to the requisite training and match montages, with help from editors Tyler Nelson (The Batman) and Jessica Baclesse (Breakwater). Creed III is visually and viscerally immersive and engaging; in the process, Jordan also crafts a movie that plots a showdown between hard work and entitlement. In one corner sits someone committed to the toil, and to earning his rewards. In the other lurks a force driven by believing he's owed, that his wins must be someone else's losses, that his enemies must suffer for him to be happy, and by spite and revenge. The Cooglers and Baylin layer in genuine and complicated reasons for Dame's bitterness towards Donnie, but never justify his unhealthy way of handling his emotions — something that the Creed films have spent two prior instalments working through with his target. If a long-held grudge linked to childhood events sounds familiar, especially with Jordan involved, that's unsurprising. So should a suddenly arriving antagonist desperate to settle a score with someone enjoying power and prominence, plus duels over a throne of sorts. Jordan sparred through them all in Black Panther, which Ryan Coogler helmed after the first Creed (the pair's third collaboration, after 2013's exceptional Fruitvale Station before both). That leaves Creed III moving on from the Italian Stallion by following in footsteps other than its own franchise's — but still following in footsteps. It asks similar questions about masculinity, strength and heroism as Black Panther. It thrives on the dynamic between its two warring men, and on the performances the actors behind them give, too. It nods towards a different future for the saga as Wakanda Forever does as well. Also, it doesn't pack as hard a punch lingering beneath that shadow; Creed III is no knockout it's still a worthy bout.
A cinema plays a key part in Twisters. Frankenstein flickers across its screen, but mother nature proves not only more of a monster, but also an audience member worse than folks who can't manage to spend two hours in a darkened room without their phones. There's a knowing air to featuring a picture palace in this disaster-flick sequel from Minari director Lee Isaac Chung and The Boys in the Boat screenwriter Mark L Smith, reminding viewers how deeply this genre and this format are linked. Almost three decades ago, as co-penned by Michael Crichton fresh off Jurassic Park's mammoth success, 1996's Twister packed movie theatres worldwide to the tune of nearly half-a-billion dollars, doing so with a spectacle. No matter if its sequel reaches the same heights at the box office globally, it too delivers better-on-the-big-screen sights, chief among them Chung and cinematographer Dan Mindel's (Star Wars: Episode IX — The Rise of Skywalker) naturalistic imagery. For those unaware going in that the filmmaker behind six-time Oscar contender Minari — a helmer who received a Best Director Academy Award nomination for his gorgeous and heartfelt work, in fact — is also steering Twisters, it isn't hard to guess from its look, including in its opening moments alone. The movie begins with storm chasers doing what they enthusiastically do. It also kicks off with a horror turn of events thanks to a tornado that exceeds their expectations, and with the crew's survivors afterwards struggling with trauma that'll later drive them forward. In these scenes and beyond, this isn't a picture of visual gloss and sheen, as witnessed right down to its lighting. Twisters remains polished, of course. It also can't tell its tale without CGI. But a choice as pivotal as valuing a genuine aesthetic tonef over a gleaming one has a massive impact. Usually gifted at reading where a whirlwind is headed, hailing from Tornado Alley and introduced with her college pals attempting to demonstrate that her passion project can tame superstorms, Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones, Where the Crawdads Sing) makes it out of the Twisters' first big tempest alive. Five years later when the feature swiftly picks up, she has swapped field work for sitting behind a New York desk as a meteorologist, however. Then her old friend Javi (Anthony Ramos, Dumb Money) tracks her down with a proposal: return to Oklahoma by his side, with his business using portable radars to scan the squalls. She's hesitant — her efforts to avoid going home have been keenly felt by her mother (Maura Tierney, The Iron Claw), too — but eventually agrees to lend her skills in predicting tornado paths to Javi's team for a single week. As Kate quickly learns, wild swirls aren't just associated with the weather when she's back rushing after gales with the wind literally in her hair. Javi's ultra-professional squad has a fierce rivalry with cowboy-style "tornado wrangler" Tyler Owens (Glen Powell, Hit Man) and his ragtag posse of offsiders, who YouTube their every move, have a hefty online following as a result, sling merchandise with his face on it, seem as cavalier as anyone can come and are eager to discover if they can shoot fireworks into a storm. If it initially appears as if there's an experts-versus-amateurs, experience-versus-influencers battle at the heart of Twisters, Chung and Smith never skew that simplistic. Rather, one of their themes is valuing knowledge but not gatekeeping or snap judgements — and, as its debut twister reinforces from the outset, recognising the importance of diving beyond first perceptions. Vortexes wow, threaten and devastate. Opposites-attract type characters do exactly that. Not everyone's motives are what they might seem. Personal histories demand overcoming as much as the gusty uproars spiralling around America's centre. Those expected plot mechanics don't play out perfunctorily, though, for a few reasons. The story behind the script is credited to Powell's Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski, who was previously eyed to helm here — and while there's a few familiar beats evident in the last flick in cinemas boasting his involvement and this one, a different need for speed pulses through, as well as a different contemplation of soaring versus being grounded. In what shouldn't feel like such a rarity for a disaster film but does given where the genre typically heads, Twisters also cares about its figures, the sense of awe that gets them bounding into danger, the clash between the environment and those who live within it, the effect of climate change, the human toll that tornadoes wreak, the communities affected and intimate stories set shaped by America's landscape. While Twister isn't the only movie that springs to mind when thinking about Helen Hunt (Hacks) and the late Bill Paxton (The Circle), it's up there with the instant selections. Edgar-Jones, Ramos and Powell each enter Twisters on recent rolls of standout roles that respectively cover Normal People, In the Heights and Anyone But You, and all add this to their list of memorable parts. Matching Chung's approach and visuals, there's an earthiness and sincerity to Edgar-Jones' performance as the movie's haunted and wounded action hero. Ramos, as innately charming an on-screen presence as Powell, ensures that his complicated character is always empathetic. Dialling up the swagger, then the charisma and thoughtfulness, Powell equally navigates a textured arc with confidence. Albeit in support — and adding flavour as a group more than individually — the film's savvy casting also extends to The Crowded Room's Sasha Lane, Love Lies Bleeding's Katy O'Brian, Nope's Brandon Perea, Pantheon's Tunde Adebimpe, Totally Killer's Kiernan Shipka, Bad Sisters' Daryl McCormack and Pearl's David Corenswet. Making certain that Twisters' spinning furores don't blow its people, their emotions and their everyday lives away — including when that's a grimly inescapable element of the narrative, because disaster movies always have a body count — still requires those tempests to thunder with full cinema-shaking sound and fury. Getting personal here isn't a case of skimping on effects, then, even if cows don't fly this time. Instead, Chung adds his clear affection for character, for seeing his main players react to the wonders around them Spielberg-style (the iconic The Fabelmans filmmaker is an executive producer), and for portraying the US terrain so routinely ravaged by the weather to digital and practical wizardry that values the sensory and intense (as also aided by editing from Terilyn A Shropshire, The Woman King). No one wants a storm to strike twice, but this franchise has achieved it — and as gets yelled within its frames, does its utmost to notch up another feat. "We've gotta get everyone into the movie theatre," it shouts; that's exactly where this flick is a sight to behold.
Watching a film by French writer/director Bertrand Bonello can feel like having a spell cast upon you. In movies such as 2016's Nocturama and 2019's Zombi Child, that's how magnetic and entrancing his blend of ethereal mood and dreamy imagery has felt. So it is with The Beast, too, another hypnotic feature that bewitches and also probes, because none of these three Bonello flicks ask their viewers to merely submit. Rather, they enchant while raising questions about the state of the world, whether digging into consumerism and anarchy, hierarchies of race and class, or the role of humanity in an increasingly technology-mediated society. The latter is the domain of the filmmaker's loose adaptation of Henry James' 1903 novella The Beast in the Jungle — a take that, as its author didn't and couldn't, perceives how the clash of humanity's emotions and artificial intelligence's data-driven analysis is fated to favour the cold and the calculating. In 2044, the very fact that people are guided by their feelings has rendered them unsuitable for most jobs in The Beast's AI-dominated vision of the future. Played with the mastery of both deeply conveyed expression and telling stillness that's long characterised her performances, Dune: Part Two, Crimes of the Future and No Time to Die's Léa Seydoux is Gabrielle, who is among the throngs relegated to drone-like drudgery in this new world order. To shift her daily reality, where she reads the temperature of data cores, she only has one path forward: a cleansing of her DNA. It involves spending sessions immersed in a black goopy bath to confront her emotions and past, a procedure that she's told will rid her of her trauma and baggage. Crossing paths with Gabrielle at the treatment centre, Louis (1917 and True History of the Kelly Gang's George MacKay) has the same choice. Bonello begins The Beast with the opposite of stolidness, with green-screen acting as Gabrielle reacts to directions uttered her way by an off-screen voice, and with her eyes widening and voice screaming at a monster who'll be added in the post-production process. It's a stunning introduction. Seydoux is transfixing from this moment onwards, but the entire range of her portrayal from cool and collected to uncertain and then terrified is captured in mere minutes. Bonello also thrusts fear, a key theme of James' book and this picture alike, to the fore — as well as the notion of being petrified of something intangible. The scene recognises that that which makes our blood run cold doesn't always exist, and queries how we make the panic in our heads and hearts feel real. It also turns Gabrielle into a doll behaving at someone else's behest, revealing a motif that'll continue to pop up while examining how much agency we have when imagined nightmares can so easily control us. The Gabrielle that starts off the movie isn't and is the Gabrielle going all Under the Skin-meets-Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in 2044. Wafting around a surreal atmosphere that recalls David Lynch's Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire as well, The Beast flits between parallel Gabrielles in different times, as she does while submitting to purification. Sometimes she's the Gabrielle of the feature's present. Then, she's a past-life Gabrielle in France in 1910. Rounding out the trio: another prior version in 2014 in Los Angeles. In the 20th century, the character is a pianist whose husband owns a doll-making factory. In the early 21st century, she's an actor and model housesitting a gleamingly lavish mansion while doing the audition rounds to get noticed. Louis dwells in all three as well, orbiting around her — as a romantic option who isn't afraid of pursuing a married woman in the Belle Époque era just before the Great Flood inundated Paris, then a misogynistic 30-year-old virgin broadcasting his lifted-from-actuality diatribes online in the 2010s just as the La Habra earthquake hits, then a man drawn her way and facing the same haunting feel-or-thrive dilemma that has Gabrielle in a tub. In The Beast in the Jungle, the tale's namesake is the lurking belief pulsing through James' protagonist that calamity awaits. 1910's Gabrielle has confessed the same concerns. The novel and the film each plunge into a potential self-fulfilling prophecy, then: if we expect doom and gloom, and we base our decisions upon its arrival, do we destine ourselves for it? In response, a seize-the-day message washes through the two iterations of this story; however, the timing that Bonello uses for his triptych's chapters gives The Beast a telling push and pull. One person's catastrophising is another's being prepared — and, as existence today means grappling with the sci-fi dystopian notions of AI and climate change becoming real, the filmmaker, who co-scripts with Benjamin Charbit (Spirit of Ecstasy) and Guillaume Bréaud (Eat the Night), sees that seeming irrationally wary of the possible worst-case scenario doesn't preclude a life-altering disaster from happening. Bonello doesn't just want to observe The Beast's recurring loops — like dolls, pigeons and telling fortunes as well as 'Evergreen' by Roy Orbison repeat — but to make the emotions that spring, as well as the battle with even having them, seep into his viewers. Not just Seydoux but Mackay are excellent choices to make good on this aim, each gifted at a very particular task: relaying the full swell and swirl of feelings that comprises every variation of Gabrielle and Louis human for better and for worse, and also makes them distinct, while spying the echoes between them in each era. Around his two leads, production design, costume design, hairstyling and makeup are crucial. The film veers from period romance to psychological thriller and then sci-fi horror across its trio of intertwined parts, and every craft choice — Josée Deshaies' (Passages) lingering cinematography included — enforces the distinction. And yet, Seydoux and Mackay could've unleashed their potent performances solely against green backgrounds with the same look throughout and had the same impact. To watch The Beast is to experience the premonitory unease, and the back-and-forth between the hope of joy and the dread of the unknown, that colours its tales within tales and its hops from genre to genre. This is a film with chaos and change at its core, but that spots the anchors and emotions that remain the same no matter what portrait of life is unfurling. First with android doll Kelly (Saint Omer's Guslagie Malanda, also exceptional), 2044's Gabrielle frequents a hidden-away nightclub where the theme cycles between a specific year night by night. One evening, it's 1972. Another, it's 1980. On yet another, it's 1963. There Bonello goes, finding a way to distill his film down to its essence yet again, as his opening sequence does — because what is navigating being alive and falling in love if not never knowing what any given day or night will bring, regardless of the time or impending ruin, then trying to face that fact? If technology steals that truth away, The Beast posits, our nature is conjure up a way to take solace in it anyway.
Every film is a portrait of ups and downs, no matter the genre. Without change and complications, plus either a sprinkling or a shower of chaos, there's little in the way of story for a movie to tell. In just three features, each hitting cinemas Down Under in successive years since 2022, Macedonian Australian filmmaker Goran Stolevski has demonstrated how deeply he understands this fact — and also that life itself is, of course, the same rollercoaster ride. So, when Housekeeping for Beginners starts by jumping between a joyous sing-along and a grim doctor's visit, he lays that juxtaposition between existence's highs and the lows bare in his third picture's frames. He has form: You Won't Be Alone, his folkloric horror film set in 19th-century Macedonia, segued early from new life to a witch's fate-shaping demands; Of an Age, a queer love story that unfurls in Melbourne, kicked off by flitting between dancing and a desperate against-the-clock rush. In You Won't Be Alone, the shapeshifting Wolf-Eateress who chose an infant to be her protege was played by Anamaria Marinca, the Romanian actor who has proven an unforgettable screen presence ever since the one-two punch of 2004's TV two-parter Sex Traffic — which won her a Best Actress BAFTA — and 2007's Cannes Palme d'Or-winning film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. Stolevski reenlists her assistance for Housekeeping for Beginners, and also illustrates his awareness of another immutable fact: that the eyes of Anamaria Marinca relay tales all by themselves. Here, they're weary but sharp and determined. They're devoted yet fierce, too. They possess the unrelenting gaze of someone who won't stop fighting for those she loves no matter what it takes, and regardless of how she initially reacts, a path that her social-worker character Dita is no stranger to traversing. That aforementioned crooning comes courtesy of precocious five-year-old Mia (newcomer Džada Selim), her rebellious teenage sister Vanesa (fellow debutant Mia Mustafa) and the charming Ali (Samson Selim, another first-timer), the young man who newly shares their Skopje abode. Everyone, including Vanesa and Mia's mother Suada (Alina Șerban, Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn), dwells under Marinca's Dita's roof — with the latter not just cohabitating with her girlfriend and her kids, but turning the house that she inherited into a refuge for those that North Macedonian society frowns upon. Ali is the latest lover of Dita's longterm gay roommate and friend Toni (Vladimir Tintor, Kumovi), hanging around after an app hookup. Young lesbians Elena (Sara Klimoska, Tin Kamp), Flora (Rozafë Celaj, Sophia) and Teuta (Ajshe Useini, yet another newcomer) also call the spot home. Being queer isn't a criminal offence in Housekeeping for Beginners' setting, but both same-sex marriage and adopting children by LGBTQIA+ couples are illegal. In the country's class system, being anything but Macedonian is also hardly greeted with warmth; Dita is Albanian, while Suada, her children and Ali are Romani. This motley crew is navigating each and every day the best that they can together; however, their safe space has grief in its future. It's Suada and Dita who attend the medical appointment at the movie's start, with Suada diagnosed with stage-four pancreatic cancer. Her one wish: that Dita adopt her girls, and also get married to and play happy families with Toni, who is Macedonian, so that Mia and Vanesa will be free of the stigma that Suada has always had to weather as a Roma woman. Stolevski is a plunge-in director — and screenwriter and editor, again taking on all three roles on Housekeeping for Beginners as he did on Of an Age. He dives into lives already in action and motion, crafting films that feel like they're dropping in. Ups and downs have preceded the events that his movies spin into their plots, then, and more will follow after his flicks tap out. Accordingly, he isn't one to spoon-feed specifics and context. The dynamics between his characters in Housekeeping for Beginners are revealed to audiences naturally, as are the setbacks and discrimination they encounter, often as viewers spend time in Dita's always-noisy, always-bustling home. While this isn't a one-location picture — Šutka, the Skopje municipality that's the world's only local administrative area with Balkan Romani as its official language, also features heavily — it is a film where observing its key figures in surroundings both comforting and challenging conveys as much as dialogue. Putting Marinca at the fore, a mix of grace and intensity beaming from her performance as Dita, was always going to rank among Stolevski's best choices in a feature filmmaking career that's already filled with stellar casting (see: Constellation's Noomi Rapace, Bad Behaviour's Alice Englert and Elite's Carloto Cotta in You Won't Be Alone; and also Swift Street's Elias Anton, Eden's Thom Green and Savage River's Hattie Hook in Of an Age). He's also a detail-driven director, making emotions and complexities plain in decisions as simple as the arrangement of people at a wedding and where the camera peers (or doesn't) when someone is speaking. And, again and again, he guides portrayals to match. From Șerban, he gets blistering power, with Suada explosive from the moment that she questions whether her medical treatment is being shaped by her ethnicity. Džada Selim, Samson Selim and Mustafa are all discoveries, too, breathing realism and vitality into the movie's youngest hearts and minds. Roving and intimate cinematography from Naum Doksevski (Sestri) also ensures that watching Housekeeping for Beginners feels akin to stepping inside it — and pondering the same questions that Dita, Suada, Toni, Ali and company each are. As the film that was selected as North Macedonia's Oscar contender in 2024's Best International Feature category (The Zone of Interest won) rides just a sliver of the ups and downs that its characters will face in their days, albeit significant ones, it gets them examining what comprises a family. There might be no such thing as a smooth-sailing journey from birth to death, or a surefire way to avoid heartbreak and loss, for anyone. There certainly isn't within Housekeeping for Beginners, which can also skew darkly comic when it comes to the bureaucratic hoops that require jumping through. But as Stolevski charts in his third movie about yearning for a place to belong, it's the people that you share those travails with day in and day out that makes a household.
Move over New York — it's time for New South Wales to be overrun by a simian civilisation. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes doesn't swap the Statue of Liberty for the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Rather, it was just made in Australia; this franchise is long past needing to anchor itself in a specific location, but America's west coast is the in-narrative setting. No it-was-earth-all-along twists are necessary, either, as France's famous gift to the US signalled back in 1968 when Pierre Boulle's novel La Planète des singes initially made it to the screen. More than half a century later — plus four sequels to the OG Planet of the Apes, both live-action and animated TV shows, Tim Burton's (Wednesday) remake and the reboot flicks that started with 2011's Rise of the Planet of the Apes — the saga's basics are widely known in pop culture. The titular planet is humanity's own. In this vision of the future, a different kind of primate runs the show. Since day one, every Planet of the Apes tale has been a mirror. Gazing into the science-fiction series means seeing the power structures and societal struggles of our reality staring back — discrimination, authoritarianism and even the impact of a world-ravaging virus should ring a bell— but with humans no longer atop the pecking order. These are allegorical stories and, at their best, thoughtful ones, probing the responsibilities of being the planet's dominant force and the ramifications of taking that mantle for granted. Not every instalment has handled the task as well as it should've, but those that do leave a paw print. Coming after not just Rise of the Planet of the Apes but also 2014's Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and 2017's War for the Planet of the Apes, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes falls into that category. First helmed by Rupert Wyatt (The Gambler), with Matt Reeves (The Batman) taking over for the second two titles, the most-recent Apes trilogy had Caesar (Andy Serkis, Andor) at its centre. Raised by humans before the simian flu devastated the population and evolved apekind, he spearheaded the latter's uprising. That said, Caesar also retained his compassion for homo sapiens, especially as he gleaned how the worst traits in all primates are the same no matter what they're covered in. His time has now been and gone in the franchise. Swapping from one dystopian saga to another, The Maze Runner, The Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials and The Maze Runner: Death Cure director Wes Ball picks up briefly with a farewell to Caesar — but then, for the bulk of the picture, he takes Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes forward through many generations and several hundred years. The influential figure's name is now revered, and his wisdom — but, like humans, apes mould the plights and teachings of historical leaders to suit their own agendas. To some, Caesar is the reason to treat people, or "echoes" as they've been dubbed after losing the ability to speak, with kindness, understanding what the species once was and how it has fallen. For others, particularly of the power-hungry variety, he's the justification for retaining control of the planet by violence and at all costs. But in the peaceful eagle clan, birds not long-ago commanders are the main focus. So, when adolescent Noa (Owen Teague, You Hurt My Feelings), his crush Soona (Cowboy Bebop) and pal Anaya (Travis Jeffery, Before Dawn) leap into the story early, they're collecting eggs to take home, nurture and then rear the hatchlings, one of their community's rites of passage. In a narrative penned by Josh Friedman (Foundation) that nods eagerly to classic westerns, the pursuit of dominance at its most vicious at the hands of a warrior tribe taints young Noa's life quickly. Soon, everything that he knows is gone, sparking a hero's journey to rescue those among his loved ones that he can. When he crosses paths with orang-utan sage Raka (Peter Macon, The Orvill), he receives guidance, including about Caesar's pleas for ape unity. He's also counselled to tamper down his anger at and disdain for the feral human (Freya Allan, Baghead) shadowing his tracks, who he partly blames for his status quo turning to tragedy. Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand, Abigail), the ruler directing a monkey regime of carnage, only has eyes for as much authority and supremacy as he can amass — and so in him, the encampment that he's made where apes enslave apes and his staunchly anti-human ideology, Noa finds a threat. Decades since dressing up actors in costumes to play the series' apes was the norm, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes doesn't just have thematic and emotional realism on its side — it's never been hard to spot the franchise's parallels with reality — but also the verisimilitude gifted by its motion-capture approach (with Wētā FX doing the honours). That's how Serkis inhabited his part, and how Teague and company (everyone except Allan and Ricky Stanicky's William H Macy from the top-billed cast, in fact) follow in his footsteps. Serkis was a special consultant on the production, aiding the actors with their simian performances; the feelings conveyed through their work as a result are deep and affecting. Whether Teague is charting Noa's coming-of-age arc away from blissful naivety, the scene-stealing Macon is making Raka's appeal for empathy resonate or Durand is commanding every second that he's in sight as the hubristic Proximus, their portrayals are rich and insightful. Yes, you could call the performances that drive Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes' "human". Painted with pixels over the top, the film's digital fur looks so vivid that audiences can be forgiven for thinking they can touch it — and that combination of naturalistic, grounded and relatable portrayals with special effects that get viewers investing in the movie's animals as animals is potent and pivotal. In a saga that's always been committed to aping the state of the off-screen world, that reflective effect is essential. Ball and his team, cinematographer Gyula Pados (Shazam! Fury of the Gods, plus the last two Maze Runner flicks) among them, also do detail and world-building well, rendering the planet a mix of lush greenery and decaying human relics that equally appears as authentic as CGI can. Their biggest struggle: that there's so much to explore in this new Planet of the Apes beginning that not everything is told as gracefully and clearly as it could be, even across 145 minutes. As with almost everything that hits screens of late, this has been conceived as the catalyst for more to come — and it earns the enthusiasm to keep swinging.
Michael Mann makes movies like a man haunted. From his 1981 debut Thief to his latest release Ferrari, it's no wonder that his films linger with viewers. Mann's work whirrs with the pursuit of professional greatness, and with the pressures of balancing that relentlessly revving chase with personal ties and desires — quests and woes that aren't his own in his narratives, but always feel intimate. Heat, 1995's Robert De Niro (Killers of the Flower Moon)- and Al Pacino (Hunters)-led crime-thriller that the filmmaker will forever be known for, has proven a spectacular example for nearly three decades. While the skilled burglar and dogged detective caught in its cat-and-mouse game are both experts in their realms, that doesn't make juggling their on-the-job and at-home realities any easier, cleaner or less chaotic. Using that very notion as its road, Ferrari is clearly the product of the same director. Perhaps Mann is speeding down that exact path after all, then, navigating the complexities of getting a film onto screens — his last was 2015's underseen Blackhat — on a mission to master his favourite themes. Mann has helmed several model features already in Thief, Heat, The Insider and Collateral, with Ferrari a worthy addition to his resume. Wheels spin on and off the track in the elegantly and exquisitely crafted slice-of-life biopic, many literally but others via its namesake's personal life. Based on Brock Yates' book Enzo Ferrari: The Man, The Cars, The Races, The Machine, as adapted by screenwriter Troy Kennedy Martin (the OG The Italian Job) to cover events in the summer of 1957 only, Ferrari is always hurtling — even when it's as patient as cinema in Mann's hands has ever been. The collision between single-minded goals and the messiness of existing constantly gives his pictures urgency, no matter how steady the gaze and stoic the character. And make no mistake, Adam Driver's (65) gravitas-dripping portrayal of race car driver-turned-sports car entrepreneur Enzo Ferrari (and Italian-accented but speaking in English, just as he did in House of Gucci) is as serious and determined as Mann's protagonists get, too. Sometimes with editor Pietro Scalia (an Academy Award-winner for JFK and Black Hawk Down) crosscutting frenetically like the film is shifting gears up and down, sometimes going for a lengthy drive in Enzo's business exploits and his home affairs separately, Ferrari tracks its protagonist's mission to save his company through racing glory in tandem with steering into his relationships with two women. Duality, a regular Mann obsession, slicks the flick like engine grease; there's two purposes to his car manufacturing, those two loves and two sons, for starters. "Two objects cannot occupy the same point in space at the same moment in time," Enzo explains, but the clashes and contrasts that surround him are hardly as clearcut as physics. Take his approach to death, for instance: over the loss of his son and heir Dino by wife Laura (Penélope Cruz, Official Competition), he seeps heartbreak like he's losing brake fluid, but the idea of tragedy befalling his drivers garners a matter-of-fact reaction, plus a speech about the life-or-death and at-all-costs commitment that his chosen sport requires — and he demands. In the world of Ferrari as a car outfit, financial struggles have both Enzo and Laura — partners in the business as well as in marriage, albeit barely hanging on in the latter — assessing options to keep their Modena factory running. Royalty might covet their vehicles, but Enzo's passion for his racing fleet is as expensive as it is dangerous. "Jaguar races to sell cars. I sell cars in order to race," is his frank description of Ferrari's manufacturing split. Bringing in outside cash from Ford or Fiat is proposed, enabling the company to increase production on its retail vehicles. The picture's choice of year also puts the last Mille Miglia in front of its windscreen, with victory in the twisty race on Italy's public streets — ideally with one of Enzo's drivers (which include River of Desire's Gabriel Leone, Lady Chatterley's Lover's Jack O'Connell and Thanksgiving's Patrick Dempsey) triumphing over Maserati — likely to help Ferrari continue vrooming. 1957 is also when Enzo's second son Piero (Giuseppe Festinese, Santa Lucia) by his mistress Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley, Dumb Money) is to be confirmed. Installed in a house outside of town, his other family remains a secret from Laura; however, as Lina angles for Enzo to let Piero take his surname and Laura frays with mourning, already well-aware that her husband isn't faithful, there's as much tension there as whenever someone has a car zipping and zooming. As Ferrari flings together melodrama and racing thrills, neither gives the audience an emotional or psychological reprieve. Mann doesn't just want to put his viewers in the film's array of driver's seats, but in a state where there's no escape from the stress — to stay solvent, to win, to avoid tearing Enzo's romances apart and inflicting more pain, and to secure his legacy. Mann obviously didn't choose Ferrari's pair of biggest stars based on their appropriate names. And Driver wasn't picked for his penchant for living up to that moniker (see: his stint as a poetry-writing bus driver in Paterson, then his time commanding spaceships in the Star Wars sequel trilogy and 65), either. Still, they're sublimely cast. Not just thanks to his silver locks but due to the intensity of his presence, Driver easily passes for a man who's a year off 60 — so, almost 20 years past the actor's own age — while wearing Enzo's iciness like armour, yet still letting his charisma peek through with Lina and Piero. Despite having a supporting part, Cruz has rarely been better than as the achingly furious and piercingly grief-stricken woman who refuses to let her contributions to the Ferrari name and Enzo's fame, and everything their nuptials and son represented, be pushed into the backseat. Given the Spanish talent's career (her Oscar for Vicky Christina Barcelona, nominations that should've been wins for Parallel Mothers and Volver, and her exceptional work in Pain and Glory, All About My Mother and Jamón Jamón as well), that's no minor feat. Ferrari's immaculate central portrayals are just two of the movie's pistons; Mann's meticulous efforts behind the lens, and at the top of his game again, is merely a third. It'll come as zero surprise to anyone familiar with his filmography that everything is that finely tuned, from the light and shadows imparted by cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt (The Killer, and Oscar-anointed for Mank) to Daniel Pemberton's (Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse) note-perfect score. And when Ferrari gets racing, especially in its centrepiece stretch that stuns and shatters, the heart pumps, nerves are shredded and little else in depicting racing in cinema compares. The only roadblock: the feeling that Mann could've told more of this tale, and about his latest unswerving but divided man, although wanting more of his work simply comes with watching it.
All of the kitchen staples, none of the excessive packaging: that's what's on offer at Mount Zero Olives' returning Zero Waste Warehouse Market. MZO is teaming up with a stack of small businesses for another event dedicated to encouraging sustainable consumption, where you can shop a range of products without unnecessary plastic. Plus, for the extra-organised shoppers among you, there'll be lots of products available to buy in bulk. It's all going down from 9am–2pm on Saturday, November 18, at MZO's Sunshine West HQ. As the name suggests, you'll need to bring your own reusable containers with you to carry your haul. Bags, bottles, jars, buckets with lids — if you can put food in it, seal it and take it all home with you, it counts. Here's what you'll be buying and stuffing into those containers: Mount Zero Olives' olives, of course, plus olive oils, pulses and grains. You can also nab some of Koji & Co's miso and shio koji pastes, Wildlife Bakery's pastries and slow-fermented sourdough, a slew of plant-based fermented treats from Gaga's Gut Loving Ferments and ethical beans from Market Lane. The latter will be pouring complimentary filter coffee to caffeinate your morning's shopping adventures. As if that wasn't sweet enough, locally produced ice cream made with Mount Zero's olive oil will also be available to purchase, courtesy of Mars Gelato.
Edgar Wright's Don't and Rob Zombie's Werewolf Women of the SS must be on their way to the big screen soon. With Thanksgiving's arrival, three of the five films teased as trailers in 2007's Grindhouse — and at the time only conceived to exist as those faux trailers — have come to full-length feature fruition. So, the double of Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror and Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof didn't just give the world biochemical zombies and a murdering stuntman, but Machete, Hobo with a Shotgun and now Eli Roth's turkey-holiday slasher horror. In this first stint behind the lens since 2021 documentary Fin, plus 2018's vastly dissimilar Death Wish and The House with a Clock in Its Walls before that, the Cabin Fever and Hostel filmmaker knows the right mood: when you're plating up a film that began as a gag ad, leaning into both tropes and a knowing vibe is the best choice for carving a path forward. There's a downside to the joke beginning and happy winking now, though: Thanksgiving sure does love sticking to a tried-and-tested recipe. Roth and screenwriter Jeff Rendell, both returning from 16 years back and sharing a story credit, have taken to the whole "Halloween but Thanksgiving" approach with the utmost dedication — because it's as plain as a roasted bird centrepiece that that's what they've purposely cooked up. The mood, the nods, the derivation: they don't add up to a new masterpiece, however, genre-defining, cult or otherwise. But there's something to be said for a film that commits to its bit with this much relish, so bluntly and openly, and with the tongue-in-cheek attitude that was baked into the Grindhouse package slathered on thick. And yes, the image that no one has forgotten for almost two decades returns, alongside other signature shots from Thanksgiving's proof-of-concept sneak peek. As they splatter around gore, not gravy, plus guts that don't belong to poultry, Roth and Rendell have given themselves a task: reverse-engineering an entire feature from a spoof trailer that made fun not just of holiday horror flicks, but of Roth's part in torture porn's boom. They're also eager to ensure that their picture locks in its place on the occasion-centric viewing calendar. The raucous Thanksgiving slides in before Black Christmas and New Years' Evil, dates-wise, and joins a roster that also spans My Bloody Valentine and April Fools' Day. This slice of the scary-movie spectrum isn't small, both in general and with past Thanksgiving-themed fare — for the latter, see also: Blood Rage, Black Friday, Blood Freak, ThanksKilling and Boogeyman, and more — but, blatantly angling for sequels as well, Roth and Rendell don't just want to dish up one serving. Thanksgiving could go by Black Thursday, the shopping opportunity that's also been dubbed Grey Thursday and Brown Thursday, because that's when and why its carnage commences. The place is still Plymouth, Massachusetts, and the slasher who'll start offing teens still nabs disguise cues from pilgrims — wearing a John Carver mask specifically, which noticeably resembles not just Plymouth Colony's first governor but V for Vendetta's Guy Fawkes mask — but the 2022-set opening is all about a crushing trip to score bargains. At RightMart, the masses gather when it's traditionally dinnertime, demanding with increasing ferocity to be let inside. The shoving and shouting becomes a stampede after the crowd sees Jessica Wright (Nell Verlaque, Big Shot) and her friends enter early because it's her dad Thomas' (Rick Hoffman, Billions) store. For some, the results are fatal, whether via being caught underfoot, copping shards of glass or getting scalped by trolleys. In adding to the bowl while spooning in pieces from horror classics, Roth and Rendell take inspiration not just Halloween but from Dawn of the Dead — aka that shopping spree gone savage — as well as A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. If Thanksgiving was a feast itself, it'd be everything from dark and light meat with cranberry sauce to sweet potatoes and pumpkin pie smashed together in a blender. Here's another mission on Roth's list: crafting killer setpieces and slayings, with the Black Thursday onslaught at the top of the heap. Not every death is inventive, but this movie and its director are all about the audience impact, with endeavouring to incite cheers, screams and laughs their stuffing and seasoning. That said, Thanksgiving is strongest when it's fresh out of the oven, then dutifully works through its recreated offings from the Grindhouse trailer and soon proves content with a stock-standard cat-and-mouse game. The bulk of the flick occurs a year following the RightMart riot, when Jessica and her fellow survivor pals Gabby (Addison Rae, He's All That), Evan (Tomaso Sanelli, Holly Hobbie), Scuba (Gabriel Davenport, Mistletoe Time Machine) and Yulia (Jenna Warren, The Young Arsonists) get tagged in a creepy social-media post. Then a diner employee turns up dead not long after waiting on them, a spree begins, and Sheriff Newlon (Patrick Dempsey, Disenchanted) and his colleagues aren't much help. Although biting into consumerism's worst impulses is on the menu, as is satirising the chase for viral fame in these always-posting times, the themes and plot aren't the main course. That status goes to upping the body count with bloodthirsty and grisly enthusiasm. The key thing to be thankful for here is that Thanksgiving's creative forces are patently having schlocky fun, including with their McDreamy casting, practical effects and some visual moments — and they don't ever stomach being subtle about it. Ditching the throwback look hasn't meant scrapping the 70s-esque tone or toning down the revelling in getting gruesome. There's a difference between appreciating how much enjoyment went into whipping up the movie and consistently having more than a by-the-numbers time with it, though. Excited chefs can still cook average meals with sprinklings of flavour, as Roth does. There's also one goal that Thanksgiving threw out with the bones: creating a picture that doesn't make viewers certain that they saw most of the best bits in that years-ago trailer.
With filmmaking in her blood, Alice Englert makes her directorial debut with a movie about a mother and daughter with cinema similarly pumping through their veins. The creative force behind Bad Behaviour is the offspring of Oscar-winner Jane Campion (The Power of the Dog) and fellow helmer Colin Englert (The Last Resort), but here focuses on actor Lucy (Jennifer Connelly, Top Gun: Maverick) and stunt performer Dylan (Englert herself). There's a knowing, winking vibe to this New Zealand-shot dramedy, then, including in the Labyrinth-starring Connelly playing a former child star, as she is; Campion popping up for a memorable cameo; and Bad Behaviour's writer/director taking on the progeny-to-a-household-name part. The internet ensures that avoiding Englert's family ties is impossible, so she wryly leans into everywhere that life can and does inspire art; however, this bold and involving spiritual retreat-set feature isn't about nudges and nods, or even built on them. When there's evident parallels between what's on-screen and reality, a question springs: take all those links away and does the film still hit its marks? The answer for Englert's first stint behind the camera after acting in Ginger & Rosa, Beautiful Creatures, Campion's Top of the Lake, Them That Follow, Ratched, You Won't Be Alone and more is a resounding yes that could be shouted from the mountaintops. Bad Behaviour savvily satirises the wellness and enlightenment industry with the look of the also Aotearoa-made Nude Tuesday, but with a finely balanced understanding of its indulgences and its meaning to attendees. There's a glorious slice of The Lobster to the picture's tone, and not just because Ben Whishaw (Women Talking) features in both. Englert also constructs two phenomenal character studies, all while never being afraid to take wild turns that push everyone out of their comfort zones on- and off-screen. Open to splashing cash but closed to almost everything except her own pain, Lucy is Loveland Ranch's latest arrival, hitting the Oregon venue seeking what everyone is paying for: bliss, peace, reassuring words, kindly ears, shoulders to lean on, a renewed sense of self and the knowledge that all is well. If Lucy also decamps to the remote spot amid towering ranges to escape her own complications, that won't be on the itinerary. A phone call en route teases what loiters elsewhere, with strain echoing down the line as she tells Dylan — who is in NZ working on a big film — where she's going. It takes time and a shocking-but-earned twist to get Lucy and Dylan in the same space in Bad Behaviour's second half, when they're each weathering their own mayhem while also sifting through shared baggage, and the tension and anxiety between them seethes with a lifetime's worth of fractures and fraying. At Loveland, new-age sessions run by guru Elon Bello (Whishaw) are meant to get spiky, process trauma and demand hard work. That's even more true with its latest attendee, her dripping cynicism and her immediate distaste for self-obsessed model Beverly (Dasha Nekrasova, Succession). Everyone lapping up Elon's teachings has woes to wade through, with Lucy's distress at the path her life has taken since her heyday — she mentions a "warrior princess" role — just one problem put to the group. She's trying yet she's also igniting in a place where platitudes are doled out as wisdom and no one truly wants to do anything but hog the limelight. That the camp insists on silence between therapy chatter is an astute comic touch from Englert: the facility's customers gleefully believe that it'll help, purchasing the privilege of being told so and also struggling to comply; as scripted and portrayed, they'd also genuinely benefit from stopping to think through rather than natter about their emotions. As Lucy is stuck in agonising mother-baby role-play classes that go as well as anyone would expect — although in Englert's hands, nothing plays out as anyone could anticipate — Dylan is on set. There, plying her trade, getting bruises for her efforts and sporting a crush are her daily minutiae. Penned with precision, both of Bad Behaviour's threads tease out details about its two central women, whether unpacking Lucy's unhappiness, guilt and contempt, or exploring why Dylan seeks peril professionally and personally alike. A mother-daughter reckoning is always coming, though. Englert not only makes the build-up and the fallout equally knotty, revelatory and compelling — she commandingly establishes the ins and outs of her two protagonists beyond the most important relationship in their lives. More than four decades after her first-ever screen credit and two since winning the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for A Beautiful Mind, Connelly remains a reason to seek any project out. While she isn't Bad Behaviour's sole highlight, she's that good. Of late, she's been stellar in the TV version of Snowpiercer as well (also navigating uneasy parental bonds), but this film boasts one of her next-level performances. Stepping into Lucy's shoes is a go-for-broke effort to dive into the character's many complexities and conflicts, and Connelly is not only excellent but rivetingly raw and deeply resonant. She's also delightfully funny in the film's wry way. Englert has cast herself well, too, showing off her wit and empathy as an actor in a feature with no weak on-screen links, Whishaw, Ana Scotney (Millie Lies Low), Beulah Koale (Dual) and Marlon Williams (Sweet Tooth) among them. References to Englert and Connelly's pasts aren't all that Bad Behaviour wears proudly, clearly; thorniness is embraced just as strongly and ambition gleams bright. There's no doubting that this picture is the product of someone who knows what she wants to dig into, shower around, contemplate, excavate, call out and laugh at — and that it's made by a filmmaker who is as certain of how she wants her feature to look and feel at every moment. As cinematographer Matt Henley (Coming Home in the Dark) takes in the surroundings, it isn't difficult to spot New Zealand standing in for Bad Behaviour's American half, although there's a fitting air to that to that move in this movie. Perspective is a core part of this emotionally lingering flick, as is seeing intricacies in multiple lights as Englert shines the torch.
If summer screams ice cream to you, then there's only one way to start the season: indulging in your favourite frosty treat. That's great advice in general, but gelato chain Gelatissimo has an even better spin on it. Hit up one of its 48 stores around the country from 5pm until closing time and you'll nab $3 scoops. The date: Friday, December 1. The place: at all Melbourne Gelatissimo shops. The offer: creamy gelato for just a couple of gold coins, all to celebrate the official start of the warm weather and indulge in a dessert staple. The deal stacks, too, so you can get a double scoop for $6. Friday, December 1 also happens to be the day that Gelatissimo is releasing its latest limited-edition flavours, which you can try for just $3 a pop as well. Get ready for cookies and cream made with Milkybar, a mint version but made with KitKat and a blue take.
There is no better feeling than a crisp sip of cold beer on a late spring afternoon. Pair that with a bite of some of Melbourne's finest eats and you've got yourself a recipe for a good time. And in good news for pretty much everyone, Molly Rose has taken this feeling and turned it into a brand new festival. On Sunday, November 12, the brewery's sprawling beer garden in Collingwood will host a curated lineup of founder and brewer Nic Sandery's top brewery buds from around Victoria and Australia. Here's the best part: each brewery is pairing up with chefs and restaurants to concoct the ultimate beer-food pairing. So, whether it's a tangy brew from Range Brewing met with a spicy bite of a Ca Com banh mi, a sip from Black Arts Brewers and Blenders paired with a sweet treat from T.Cavallaro & Sons Pasticceria, or a dreamy southern Tasmanian combo of Bruny Island Beer Co and Bruny Island Cheese Co, your tastebuds are in for a wild ride. Now, the festival isn't just about indulgence. It's also about treating our home planet right. Thanks to a partnership with Plumm glassware, attendees will swig brews from special festival glasses. At the end, you can either buy the glass for $15 or return it for reuse next year. There's more. Festival tees made by The Common Good Company can only be preordered, which means no more forgotten or unwanted 'free' tees turning into wardrobe waste. Punters can choose from a day session running from 11am–3pm, or a twilight session, running from 3pm–8pm. Tickets will set you back $130, and will include two 150-millilitre beers from six different brewers, along with a food pairing for each. And if you're itching to delve deeper into the beer-food pairing universe, Molly Rose and The Crafty Pint are hosting a masterclass lunch the day before the festival, on Saturday, November 11. Seats cost $150 and are limited, but the experience promises to be unlimitedly delicious.
After six months of filling the bellies of those in the know with delicious Italian-inspired snacks, Freddy's Pizza's sizzling residency at Young Hearts is drawing to a close. And the only way to send off such an ace collab? A rager of a farewell party, of course. Scheduled for Saturday, September 23 — starting at 2pm sharp — this bash is set to be the ultimate see ya later to what's been a stunning run. Think: a nostalgic last school dance, only replace the awkward dancing with limoncello shots and pizzas. Speaking of which, upon arrival, the Young Hearts foyer will welcome guests with a Tommy's Booze pop-up tasting so you can start the evening with a smooth limoncello shot and a fun polaroid snap. The party vibes will be looked after with DJs and a smorgasbord of Freddy's favourites, from cacio e pepe croquettes to chicken cotoletta and, of course, the beloved eggplant sandos. Whether you've been a long-time fan or it's your first time, head down to Young Hearts to say arrivederci Freddy's in style. Entry is free, but you'll need your wallet to enjoy a bite and a drink after the first limoncello shot.
Calling all wine lovers (so basically, everyone). A new event is coming to Collingwood giving you the chance to sample some of the best wines Yarra Valley has to offer, all for free. Into The Valley is a collaboration between the Yarra Valley Smaller Wineries Association and Collingwood's zero-waste cafe Into Coffee. It will take place every Thursday night for three weeks from September 21 and will star wine from 14 of the Yarra Valley's best boutique wineries. Each night will have two tasting slots, 6–7pm and 7–8pm, and will be capped at 50 people, so bookings are essential. And, while the wine tastings are free, plenty of bottles will be available to purchase directly if you happen to find a drop you simply must take home. You'll have the chance to meet the winemakers, learn about their wines and taste some truly unique drops — all while enjoying the company of other Melbourne wine enthusiasts. If you've been hanging to head to the Yarra Valley, or been meaning to expand your palate, this might just be what you've been praying for. With hundreds of wines on offer — from the classics to the boundary-pushing — you might just find your new favourite vino. Hey, you might just find your soulmate. At the very least, you'll find the perfect place to relax and enjoy a glass of wine with friends on a lovely Thursday night in spring.
This Christmas, all you need is love — plus a festive little cabaret that showcases all of the hit tunes from Love Actually. It's the way to celebrate the season when you're not just leaving the seasonal favourite flick on repeat at home. Yep, that's Christmas Actually. Created by the folks behind Rumour Has It and Lady Beatle, Christmas Actually features all of the tracks that've become synonymous with this merry time of year — including Mariah Carey's 'All I Want for Christmas Is You', naturally. Songs by Joni Mitchell, Norah Jones, Eva Cassidy, The Beach Boys and The Beatles are all on the bill as well. Belting them out: Libby O'Donovan, Joshua Robson, Stefanie Jones, JD Smith, Stephen Ward, Craig Newman, Ben Kiehne and Fab Omodi. There'll even be more than one nativity lobster, plus a jolly mood and a whole room full of festive cheer. In Melbourne, that room is The Round, where Christmas Actually plays its 2023 season from Friday, December 15–Saturday, December 16. Get excited by revisiting Love Actually's trailer below. 'Tis the season, after all. Top image: Katy Bedford.
There's no shortage of ways to celebrate Halloween, whether scary movies, eerie art, a trick-or-treating stint, playing with Lego or themed mini golf is your thing. Here's a particularly tasty one: getting dressed up in costume and scoring a free Krispy Kreme doughnut. The chain is known for giving away its round treats, including handing out 100,000 of them each National Doughnut Day. For Tuesday, October 31, it isn't locking in an exact number of doughnuts that'll be on offer — but it will give one to everyone who turns up to a Krispy Kreme store dressed for the occasion. If that isn't an excuse to don your spookiest outfit, then what is? To snag yourself a signature glazed freebie, head to your closest Krispy Kreme store in Melbourne — there's nine locations from Chadstone to Collins Street — on Tuesday, October 31 while wearing a Halloween-appropriate costume. You'll receive one original glazed doughnut per person, and you don't have to buy anything else to nab the treat without paying a cent. Of course, Krispy Kreme is hoping that you will be possessed by the Halloween vibe while you're in-store — or beforehand — and treat yourself to something from its themed range. On offer until Tuesday, October 31: four different varieties.
In the decade since her gone-too-soon death in 2012, Whitney Houston has proven one of filmmaking's greatest loves of all. No fewer than five movies have told her tale, including documentaries Whitney: Can I Be Me and Whitney. And, that's without including a feature about her daughter Bobbi Kristina, a miniseries focused on her ex-husband Bobby Brown and dramas clearly based on her story. If she was still alive, a movie like Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody would've still reached screens at some point, though. Hollywood adores music biopics, especially lately, with Houston's latest stint in the celluloid spotlight following Elvis, Respect, The United States vs Billie Holiday, Rocketman and Bohemian Rhapsody in recent years alone. I Wanna Dance with Somebody even shares screenwriter Anthony McCarten with the latter — formula and inevitability combining, as is this genre's repeated refrain. All of that attention has been echoing around Houston for obvious — and patently well-documented — reasons. Her mezzo-soprano voice, which earned her the nickname "The Voice", soared to stratospheric and literally breathtaking levels. She still holds the record for the most consecutive number-one singles on the Billboard Hot 100, which she took from The Beatles and the Bee Gees, as her career zoomed skyward as well. Houston's list of hits is massive and varied, spanning ballads such as 'Saving All My Love For You', dancefloor-filling pop like 'How Will I Know' and the anthemic 'I'm Every Woman', to name a mere few tracks. That swift rise from New Jersey church choir member to one of the biggest bestselling music artists ever was matched by tabloid-fodder lows, however, and that tragic passing — and I Wanna Dance with Somebody charts it all. Taking its name from one of Houston's most exuberant singles isn't just a music biopic 101 move, although it's definitely that. Director Kasi Lemmons (Harriet) follows the standard Wikipedia entry-like genre template, piecing together all of the requisite details, but she wants those titular words to constantly make a statement. Houston does want to dance — one of the strengths of that 80s tune has always been how genuine it feels — with the phrase used here to reflect how Whitney (Naomi Ackie, Master of None) just wants to be herself, to be loved as such, and openly be with Robyn Crawford (Nafessa Williams, Black Lightning). While still dreaming of success, Whitney and Robyn meet and sparks fly, but the times, attitudes and the demands of fame don't treat their romance kindly. I Wanna Dance with Somebody doesn't shy away from their relationship, or from the disapproval of Whitney's gospel singer mother Cissy Houston (Tamara Tunie, Cowboy Bebop) and stern father John (Clarke Peters, The Man Who Fell to Earth). Whitney just wants to keep her hair short and wear jeans, too, but being a young Black woman in the 80s shooting for music stardom comes with demands. I Wanna Dance with Somebody is never so simplistic to equate having to don dresses and wigs with not being able to be true to her sexuality, but it paints a picture of a woman consistently forced to put others' expectations of her first. So, after being signed to Arista Records at 19 by producer and executive Clive Davis (Stanley Tucci, The King's Man), Whitney becomes America's princess next door. I Wanna Dance with Somebody doesn't ignore her willingness to play the game, either — to perform the part she's told to if it means she'll keep rocketing higher, as a scene recreating the 'How Will I Know' music video shows — but the film's thesis is plain: made to be someone she wasn't, and stripped of the support she always wanted, this tale was unlikely to have a happy ending. Joining the list of Lady Macbeth actors going on to huge things — the other: Florence Pugh — Ackie gives a commanding, multi-layered performance as the conflicted Houston. I Wanna Dance with Somebody is more concerned with attitude and emotion than strict physical resemblance, and it works. That the film is raw, heartfelt and moving in conveying Whitney's plight, including through her criticism for being too white, tumultuous relationship with Brown, moving into cinema with The Bodyguard, battles with her dad over his management and her substance-abuse troubles, all comes down to that pivotal portrayal. Indeed, such is the power in Ackie's efforts, she's still a tour-de-force while she's lip-synching. Smartly, Lemmons uses Houston's own vocals. When you're making a movie about "The Voice", you need to let your audience hear said voice. Visibly, is Ackie singing herself — the feature just dubs in the star she's playing over the top — and, unsurprisingly, the scenes where Whitney is on a stage or behind a microphone are high among I Wanna Dance with Somebody's standouts. In a film that's impassioned, too, serving up electrifying performance recreations is a wise move. Baz Luhrmann's Elvis turned concert scenes into a dizzying, multi-sensory, like-you're-there art, helping demonstrate why its subject had such an impact — an approach Lemmons and her cinematographer Barry Ackroyd (The Old Guard) apply to expressing Houston's immense vocal talent. Among the key Whitney moments restaged: singing 'Home' during her 1983 stint on The Merv Griffin Show shortly after being signed by Davis, her slowed-down version of the American national anthem at the 1991 Super Bowl, busting out 'I Will Always Love You' at The Concert for a New South Africa in 1994 and her American Music Awards medley of 'I Loves You Porgy', 'And I Am Telling You' and 'I Have Nothing' that same year. Throughout the script, talk turns to breathing, challenges and the mechanics of crooning — belting out that above trio is dubbed "climbing Mount Everest without oxygen" — but seeing is believing. Spying Ackie's arms outstretched, spreading far and wide as Houston reaches for those high notes, is a potent and understandably repeated sight. Still, unlike the singer at its centre, I Wanna Dance with Somebody is content with staying in expected territory. That makes for a rousing yet routine addition to the music biopic canon — and, because Lemmons and McCarten are committed to covering as much as possible, a rushed one as well despite its 146-minute running time. As proves the case of many famous figures who earn dramatisations of their lives, there's so much to include here that multiple movies could've easily eventuated. Again, plenty of other films about Houston have already. This jam-packed on-screen dance wants to have it all and show where Houston's broken heart went, but it doesn't burn deep enough to last.
Slowly, Australia is starting to emerge from COVID-19 lockdown, which includes bars, pubs and venues — but life isn't back to normal just yet. That means that Isolation Trivia is still going strong and, on Saturday, June 13, going green as well. Yep, it's hosting a session dedicated to animated favourite Shrek. If you know why it really isn't easy being an ogre, you've watched the vibrant CGI animation more times than you can remember, and you've memorised the voices of Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy and Cameron Diaz, well, this is for you. And, as no one who has ever seen Shrek before can manage to forget, a whole lot of Smashmouth — aka 'All Star' and their version of 'I'm a Believer' — will also likely feature prominently. No bookings or registrations are required — all you need to do it hit up the event Facebook page at 6.25pm. And if you're wondering exactly which parts of the Shrek franchise you'll be quizzed on, this trivia night will focus on the 2001 movie that started it all, plus 2004's Shrek 2. So, no need to worry about Shrek the Third, Shrek Forever After, Puss in Boots, or all the Shrek short films, TV shows and TV specials. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwXOrWvPBPk
If you like your art vibrant, multisensory and immersive, you're going to get a real kick out of The Kaleidoscopic Turn. The NGV has scoured their archives, as well as acquiring numerous new pieces, to explore contemporary trends in art which play with colour, light, sound, movement and space. From Op Art to colourfield painting, the exhibition will include large installations, kinetic sculptures, video art, paintings and works on paper. With an exhibition title like The Kaleidoscopic Turn, you can expect some pretty wild and wonderful things. The works will range from pieces from the 1960s to now, where artists have experimented with pattern, repetition, light, colour, movement and space as well as various optical and kinetic effects. While there's a large focus on contemporary Australian artists, the exhibition will feature works from international figures such as Olafur Eliasson, Bridget Riley, Martha Boto and Zilvinas Kempinas. Find your happy place somewhere over the rainbow at this free NGV exhibition.
Auckland's Clap Clap Riot have a tendency to whip up a raucous, good-vibin' crowd; the dudes can't help it. Armed with catchy-as-blazes hooks, singalong singles and loud, loud amps, the foursome are rampaging across the Tasman for a short run of Australian dates down the east coast; stopping at Melbourne's Shebeen, The Brightside in Brisbane and Sydney's FBi Social for a genuine humdinger of a mini-tour. Showcasing their second album Nobody / Everybody released in February, the foursome have moved away from the more rock-steady sound of their wildly successful debut Counting Spins (which casually debuted at #1 on the Official NZ Album Chart). Produced and mixed by Kody Nielson (The Mint Chicks / Opossom) and engineered and mastered by Olly Harmer (The Naked and Famous), their second release is peppered with handclap-worthy singalongs and '60s throwbacks; a cleaner, catchier package all round. Hitting Shebeen with applauded singles 'Everybody' and 'Cold As Ice' and brand newie 'All About The Weather', Clap Clap Riot are a surefire live shindig for your Thursday. Supported by Pretty City + Five Mile Town. https://youtube.com/watch?v=h6Yk0jyoIlY
If you're of an age when you can remember burning your friend's So Fresh CD so you could stay up to date with the coolest songs of the season, congrats. You're old now. But also, congrats, because you will seriously enjoy this So Fresh shindig. The old-school get-together to end all old-school get-togethers is coming to Welcome to Thornbury on Saturday, November 23, and it'll be playing bangers strictly of the 2000s vintage. You can expect a disturbing percentage of Channel 10 alums (Australian Idol winners/losers and ex-Neighbours actors) as well as way too much Nickelback for polite company. Also, just throwing this out there: we're desperately hoping for a timely comeback of the Duff sisters duet 'Our Lips Are Sealed'. This time around, the retro tunes will come with plenty of party fun, with a ball pit, jumping castle, fireworks and face-painting, plus free fairy floss and lollipops. Entry starts from $15 for first release tickets, and of course it's obviously 18 and over — because if you're under 18 you definitely don't know what So Fresh is. Or CDs, probably.
Get ready, folk-rock fans, for a little something to spice up your musical repertoire from Okkervil River. The Texan-indie rockers have released their seventh full-length studio album, and you could hear it live this summer when they make their sixth tour of Australia. A nostalgic ode to the days of his New Hampshire-spent youth, The Silver Gymnasium is the autobiographical creation of frontman Will Sheff. Since the band members grew up in the 1980s, it's only fitting that the album stays true to the times with lots of pop influences. You probably wouldn't think of '80s pop and southwestern folk rock as a match, but Okkervil River makes it seem completely natural. Tracks like 'Stay Young' and 'Deep Down the Deep River' could be soundtrack-worthy of cult classics like The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles with their catchy tunes and reflective lyrics. You'll find yourself humming along, fondly (or not so) reminded of the glory days of your high school years.
Australian cinephiles are well and truly accustomed to seeing the rest of the world via the big screen but, after the past year, 2021's Spanish Film Festival really couldn't be more welcome. And, it won't just transport movie buffs to the country that gives the annual filmic showcase its name. Twenty features from Spain are definitely on the bill, but so are nine from Latin America. That gives Melburnians plenty of movie-watching options come Thursday, April 22, when the fest kicks off its local season for this year. You'll have until Sunday, May 9 to head to The Astor Theatre, Palace Cinema Como, Palace Brighton Bay, Palace Westgarth, The Kino, Palace Balwyn and Pentridge Cinema, tuck into some popcorn, enjoy everything from award-winning rom-coms to twisty thrillers, and pretend that you're somewhere other than your own city. Highlights include road movie Wishlist, starring Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!'s Victoria Abril; romantic comedies Rosa's Wedding and The Wedding Unplanner, because matrimony seems to be a theme; Goya Award-winner Schoolgirls, which took out the gong for Best Film; and While At War, the latest film from The Others director Alejandro Amenábar. Heroic Losers serves up a charming heist comedy starring the always engaging Ricardo Darín (Everybody Knows), while the 1950s–70s-set The Moneychanger delivers a satirical twist on crime epics. If you're only going to see one movie, though, make it Ema — not just because it stars Gael García Bernal and is directed by No, The Club, Neruda and Jackie filmmaker Pablo Larraín, but because this tale about a dancer (Mariana Di Girolamo) is a simply stunning piece of cinema. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bpt6Vffhtik&feature=emb_logo
It has been four years since Royal Stacks started slinging its burgers, fries and shakes in Melbourne, and you'd better believe it's celebrating that fact. To mark the occasion, the eatery is kicking back old school-style, throwing back to the 90s for a week-long party. All three of Royal Stacks' Melbourne stores will be serving up dishes at 90s prices — including a menu that nods to Eddie Murphy flick Coming to America, which actually inspired the whole chain in the first place. Sure, the movie was made in the late 80s, but we're sure you're willing to overlook that fact in the name of cheap burgs. From Tuesday, January 14–Tuesday, January 21, you can get your hands on a McDowell burger for $9.90, or a Prince Akeem mini burger with fries and a soft drink for the same price. Slurp down a Randy Watson Sexual Chocolate Milkshake — aka a triple-chocolate milkshake topped with crushed Tim Tams — for $5, and nab an ice cream cone for 30 cents, too. If you're eating with a pal, you can nab a Kicks Pack with two Single Stacks, two fries and two soft drinks for $19.90. At the Collins Street store, retro tunes will also be pumping through Royal Stacks' speakers — 90s bangers, obviously. And, the walls will be decked with 90s-themed decor, including movie posters, while staff will be sporting themed uniforms. Images: Giulia Morlando.
Many Melburnians are partial to a bottomless, boozy afternoon, but it's usually not the most virtuous way to spend a weekend. That's until now, thanks to the launch of The Wharf Hotel's brand-new 'cleaner' version: Guilt Free Garden Party. Grab your friends, nab a spot overlooking the Yarra River and enjoy a good Saturday afternoon session — without overindulging. For $49, you'll be sipping on free-flowing, low-sugar cocktails and enjoying nutritious (but still delicious) snacks. For drinks, there'll be cocktail jugs made with all-natural and seasonal ingredients — think tequila mixed with watermelon and basil; dark rum with spiced pineapple; vodka with mixed berries; and gin with lemon, lime and orange. Food-wise, you'll be grazing on a platter of healthy snacks. Because everything on the menu is made from naturally low sugar and low calorie foods, you won't have to worry about swaying too far from any diets or fitness goals. Even better? You can bring your fur baby along with you to enjoy an afternoon in the sunshine. The Wharf Hotel's Guilt Free Garden Party sessions kick off on Saturday, October 4 and then will run every Saturday, from 2–4pm and cost $49 per person. Bookings are essential and can be made here.
If you can't make it to Meredith over the weekend, but still feel the need to boogie down, James Holden's show at The Hi-Fi is where you should direct yourself this week. The music Holden makes defies genres by mixing them together, with anything from techno to psychedelia getting thrown into the mix. He also plays many different roles in the industry, from making his own music to producing, remixing, and being his own boss at Border Community. Holden's unique brand of electronic music is as explorative as it is danceable, and it's certainly more interesting than your average all-out doof-fest. While Holden has become renowned for his impressive DJ sets, experiencing this artist performing live is sure to be an adventure. The Oxford mathematics graduate brings something new to the well-worn world of synth and, if you’re looking to go on a musical journey while lacing up those dancing shoes, look no further.
There are many activities you can do in a two-hour time slot. You could watch all six episodes of the ABC's satirical beauty blog Sarah's Channel, cook 60 packets of 2 Minute Noodles or listen to Pink Floyd's 'Shine On You Crazy Diamond' 4.6 times. But we think the tastiest way to pass 120 minutes is to spend it eating endless plates of tacos. And that's exactly what you can on Friday, October 4, when Fitzroy's El Camino Cantina celebrates 'World Taco Day' with two hours of unlimited tacos for just $25 a pop. Rock up anytime after midday and you'll be able to dig into bottomless tacos topped with cajun chicken and pickled cabbage; minced beef, cheese and lettuce (it's meant to taste a little like a cheeseburger); or mushrooms and chipotle coleslaw. If you want to spend a bit more on your feast, you can also splurge on a $10 lobster or wagyu taco. To redeem the bottomless offer, you will need to purchase a drink of sorts. You can choose from one of the restaurant's five frozen margaritas, a glass of sangria, a Dos Equis or, really, anything else on the extensive drinks menu. To book your spot, head to the El Camino Cantina website.
Bid farewell to the working week at Courtyard Cantina. Every Friday evening throughout February, the Immigration Museum is hosting an after-work shindig, complete with pop-up bar, mouth-watering street food and free live entertainment. Each Cantina event runs from 5pm to 9pm and will feature a rotating mix of musical and culinary guests. Expect food from the likes of Feast of Merit, Trailer Made, Burn City Smokers and Mankoushe while Blair Stafford, CC:DISCO! and Cocoa Noire are at the mic. There'll also be a number of special presentations, ranging from a cocktail tasting with Fred Siggins of Black Pearl to a local fashion display courtesy of the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival. Cantina visitors will also get half price museum entry to view current exhibitions, including the Flyaway Print Exchange and Identity: yours, mine, ours. For the complete Courtyard Cantina schedule, go here.
For a single weekend this Spring experience the people, space, process and ideas that unfold within the private studios of the Yarra Valley art community. This year’s program includes 43 inspiring artists, and the not to be missed group exhibition at Oakridge Winery’s brand new beautifully designed restaurant and cellar door in Coldstream. Oakridge will open early for an Open Studios inspired breakfast on the weekend of the event, giving you a chance to view original artworks and plan your weekend studio visits using the YVOS guidebook or iPhone app. A secondary exhibition, 'Prelim' at The Memo in Healesville, also features a rare collection of preliminary sketches, studies, plans and visual diaries that artists use to inform their work. It’s a peak behind the curtain and a rare opportunity to find out more about the local artists not too far off from Melbourne’s front door. Find out more about the artists participating in this year's Yarra Valley Open Studios here.
The detection of gravitational waves was a watershed moment in astrophysics, with the 2017 Nobel Prize for Physics awarded to the team responsible for confirming their existence. Now, their discovery provides the inspiration for an immersive multimedia experience at the Melbourne Planetarium as part of this year's Melbourne Festival. Directed by local writer, poet and broadcaster Alicia Sometimes, Particle/Wave will draw on the work of poets, musicians, scientists, and sound and video artists for a unique exploration of the forces that keep the universe spinning. Image: Andrew Watson.
Director Kip Williams has turned out an impressive, stylish Australian premiere of British playwright Caryl Churchill’s Love and Information at the Malthouse. Churchill’s 45th play is a fractured meditation on knowledge, relationships and identity that takes place over 60+ scenes. She gives some guidance as to how acts and sequences within the script are ordered, but within that framework creatives tackling the work have more or less carte blanche. With so many scenes on show, Paul Jackson’s lighting design takes on an important role in delineating the work’s many transitions. This, in combination with sound design by THE SWEATS — a combination of mostly original score and music by bands like Hot Chip — might initially come across as a over-convenient solution, but as the play progresses, it’s these elements of design which provide a constant spine to these disparate scenes. They impart a sense of coherency that encourages an audience to look at the bigger picture, and at the themes emerging in the gaps between scenes themselves. The content in these sometimes very brief exchanges is often explicitly geared towards a discussion of the nature and importance of memory, uncertainty and knowledge. As the action progresses, things begin to get more serious — references to terrorism, war in Tripoli, a young schizophrenic who has stopped taking his pills because “they make it hard to get the information”. One stunning scene is as good as theatre gets, with a patient suffering Alzheimer's playing the piano joined in harmony by his two nurses. Although it’s easy to look for the contemporary cues that might have spurred on the writer’s interest in this material — namely the impact of digital technology upon our ability to relate to one another and ourselves — even when engaging with notions of virtual life, Churchill seems to be speaking to a much deeper and timeless question of connection: what is taking place in any exchange between human beings? What part of ourselves is being lost, or found? The large ensemble cast is flawless, with Marco Chiappi, Harry Greenwood, Glenn Hazeldine, Anita Hegh, Zahra Newman, Anthony Taufa, Alison Whyte and Ursula Yovich making the play’s many set, character and costume changes look effortless. The play is a co-production with the Sydney Theatre Company; Melbourne audiences should book in now before it heads up the coast. Image by Pia Johnson.
Been there, done that, repeating it all over again: in cinemas and among direct-to-home movies alike, that's sequel territory. Not all second efforts, or third or fourth or 15th, retread the first flick. Some expand the initial story instead. Others take the OG concept in completely different directions. If there's a way to jump back into a hit — or even just capitalise upon a well-known movie name — however, then someone has tried it. With a handful of such films, Monster Fest Weekender III Part 2: The Spawning is celebrating the art of the sequel. As the event's 2025 name makes plain, it's having fun with its chosen theme this time around, too. Monster Fest Weekender initially popped up a few years back, giving fans of genre cinema a second chance to enjoy Monster Fest each year — and yes, the film festival itself is a sequel as well. Monster Fest's main festival will still return later in 2025 — it took place in October in 2024 — but this'll help tide you over until then. From I Still Know What You Did Last Summer and Return to Oz to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 and Robocop 2, the three-day Monster Fest Weekender III Part 2: The Spawning is jam-packed with follow-up flicks, all playing at Cinema Nova in Melbourne from Friday, March 28–Sunday, March 30. You can also check out Return of the Living Dead Part II, Phantasm II, Candyman 2: Farewell to the Flesh and Re-Animator 2: Bride of Re-Animator.
