Reviewed by Michael Dalton

If you’re a lover of fine cinema and, more importantly, dulled by the unoriginal and uninspired excuses that have been swamping cinemas these many months, Miguel Gomes’s Tabu is a film to put at the head of your list. Films as beautifully and thoughtfully put together as this are so rare. Initially it looks like it may be a self-conscious odyssey into little other than human interaction but slowly Gomes sets us up for the main event, a passionate love story set in the wilds of colonial Africa at the base of Mount Tabu.

Reviewed by Michael Dalton

The poster for Dwayne Johnson’s new movie Snitch is phony. There stands Johnson looking muscular and ready to kick his enemies into the next century while in the background we see a truck ramming into another. With the exception of tepid flicks such as The Tooth Fairy and Be Cool (Johnson was the Only reason to see it), he’s been flexing his enormous frame and levelling his piercing gaze at his enemies for years. Here though in Snitch, an adventure based on actual events, he’s taken on the underdog role and he plays it convincingly.

Reviewed by Michael Dalton

There is no doubt theatre director Rufus Norris has taken a few cues from Robert Mulligan’s To Kill A Mockingbird with his dark, disturbing debut, Broken. This is a beautiful if occasionally unfocused film about growing up too fast in frightening surroundings, here a cul-de-sac in the suburbs of North London. Bullying, assault, cruel little girls, a violent father, and a shut-in form the rough edged foundations and through the eyes of a heroine called Skunk, played superbly by newcomer Eloise Lawrence and just as much of a comfort as Mary Badham was in Mulligan's classic, we witness the lessons and if it sprawls too much, perhaps it’s because the memories of our respective childhoods do.

Reviewed by Michael Dalton

Is it because Halle Berry has somehow become the queen of b-grade cinema that critics were so ready to carve up her latest thriller The Call? Probably. You have to get past her hair (always an interesting discussion point in her film appearances) and here it looks like Mickey Mouse’s ears after you’ve taken an  egg beater to them, the strange way she has of relaying information to her co-stars (here she seems to be waiting for the cinematographer to give her the nod), and of course the increasingly odd choices she makes. Here in her latest thriller made up of gears and sprockets, you have to get past that old leap of faith where a crucial realisation is made by the heroine as she twigs to something that trained officials completely missed.

Reviewed by Michael Dalton

To review Harmony Korine’s movie Spring Breakers, all I’d really have to do is provide a picture of a bikini-clad set of breasts (preferably rubbing against another set), 100 bags of cocaine, as many joints and even more guns, and the word Innocence with a jagged line drawn through it. Perhaps I should. When I checked Rotten Tomatoes I thought I must have been seeing double (a natural side effect from suffering through a film that is obsessed with butt cheeks and said breasts) when it said 66%. Obscene, drug-crazed, alcohol-splattered, smoky from the endless puffing joints, joyfully sexist, and underneath it all, a sloppily delivered message about growing up and learning priorities, is the squiggly narrative line of Spring Breakers. 

Reviewed by Lachlan Williams

Meet Gerry and his daughter Sally. Gerry's got problems – drink, inner (and outer) violence, and some awful churning turmoil beneath it all that he keeps in check with an exterior of aggressive, all-knowing cynicism lubricated by cheap wine. Sally's sick of his shit, and wants him to get the help he needs, because she's done with taking care of him, family or not. Gerry and Sally live on a living-room sized raised wooden platform in the middle of a theatre that spins when they need to be somewhere else, which is a very impressive and expensive way of doing scene changes. It also must have taken some getting used on the part of the seasick cast.

Reviewed by Hazel Menehira

This superbly presented hardback fits the bill and ticks all the boxes as a classic piece of Australian junior fiction. The storyline by Michelle Gillespie is based on an historical shipwreck tragedy of 1876 and it is set securely in powerful illustrations by Sonia Martinez to highlight the dramatic narrative. As a child Gillespie, who was born in Perth, spent childhood holidays exploring the Margaret River region whilst the illustrator Martinez, who lives in Fremantle, was a prolific drawer of horses in her pre-teen years. This team effort has paid off for them both and it is pleasing that the Department of Culture and the Arts recognised this with sponsorship. Teaching notes can be obtained for this book from the publishers. 

Reviewed by Michael Dalton 

In 2010, director Derek Cianfrance delivered a searing examination of the end of a marriage with Blue Valentine. Starring Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams, it utilised the fractured narrative approach and cut between the happier days and the emotionally fraught ones and it felt so authentic (Gosling and Williams workshopped their roles intensely in preparation), it was more like a documentary. Cianfrance has now returned with The Place Beyond The Pines, a far grander melodrama with a powerhouse cast, more scope and colour, and far less impact.

Reviewed by Michael Dalton

When Sam Raimi's Evil Dead was unleashed on unsuspecting moviegoers in 1981, we were taken by surprise. There had never been anything quite like it. Armed with a complete lack of restraint and designed to make our skin crawl, there was a fearless quality in the way it was realised and even today with its primitive effects, its still a bullseye. Heading out in a strictly limited release and understandably endowed with an R rating, the blood certainly runs thick and heavy in the unnecessary upgrade "directed" by Fede Alvarez but gone is the sense of mischief that Raimi riddled the dark corners of the horror cabin with that Ash and his unwitting companions checked into. Its all been replaced with a collection of personality-free characters (one, a junkie, has come to surrender to the pangs of withdrawal) who all but line up to be violently abused by a hostile demon who, along with Alvarez it would seem, just can’t wait to get started.

Reviewed by Fiona Scotney

Red is a play about a colour, a painter, and a life-changing commission. In 1958, the Russian born American painter Mark Rothko (Marcus Yakovlevich Rothkowitz) accepted a commission to decorate the Four Seasons restaurant of the new Seagram building in New York, designed by Philip Johnson and Mies van der Rohe. This commission should have been in many ways the highlight of Rothko’s career. It was not only a prestigious and lucrative job; it was also at the time the largest commission ever offered to an artist. Yet by the following year, even though he had painted thirty canvases for the room which could hold only seven paintings, he cancelled the commission and returned the money. Rothko never revealed the reasons behind his change of mind and abandonment of the project. Red dramatises Rothko’s struggle with the commission, speculating on the tension between success and integrity, and Rothko’s desire to be known but appreciated on his own terms.