Film
emma.simmonds
David Michôd’s stark, screw-tight debut is, in his own words, a “grand Melbourne crime drama”. Though it presents us with a menagerie of criminality it eschews many of the paradigms of the genre and feels courageous in its elegant, near suffocating intensity.Joshua “J” Cody (James Frecheville) is our emotionally impotent, blank-slate narrator, blunted by a life that relentlessly deals him a losing hand. After his mother overdoses he is taken in by his Grandma “Smurf” (a stunning, Oscar-nominated Jacki Weaver), a “Mommie Dearest” mafioso who has raised a gang of armed robbers. A lumbering Read more ...
Jasper Rees
So. That’s it then. It’s taken just shy of 20 hours to work through the lot, a gestation spread across a decade. Every British actor in the firmament has visited the Leavesden set to chew on some of the computer-generated furniture. Several trillion techie hours have been racked up on achieving SFX which wouldn’t have been even a twinkle in a geek’s eye when JK Rowling first conceived the seven-part tale of a boy wizard. And a trio of young actors cast before puberty have missed out on a decade’s worth of regular schooling. Instead they’ve been boarding at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Read more ...