Australia
Harry Thorfinn-George
In Late Night With the Devil, light entertainment rubs shoulders with demonic forces on a talk show. It isn't quite the homerun its 97% Rotten Tomatoes rating would suggest, but this Australian indie production punches above its weight with an effective found-footage concept and lived-in 1970s setting. Regrettably, excitement for the movie's long-awaited cinema release has been dampened by controversy over its makers' use of AI-generated images.An opening montage sequence swiftly establishes the premise. Televisions feed footage of the Vietnam War and satanic panic into the homes of Americans Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This is writer-director Warwick Thornton’s third feature film, his first since 2017's excellent Sweet Country, and it took him 18 years to bring it to the screen. He describes it as “a really special one” with “a lot to say”, though viewers may find themselves having to ponder long and hard to figure out The New Boy’s layers of meaning.It’s a mysterious parable about an Aboriginal boy (Aswan Reid) who we first see involved in a fierce struggle with a mounted police patrol amid miles of Outback countryside, which comes to an end when he’s knocked unconscious by a boomerang. The story is set in Read more ...
James Saynor
For those who ever wonder if soccer scoreboards, or score-line captions on TV, can ever be made to reach three figures, consider the match between AS Adema and SO l’Emyrne, two teams in Madagascar, in 2002. It ended 149-0, but that was only because of an on-field protest. (They were all own goals.)A more shocking shellacking was a year earlier when American Samoa lost 31-0 to Australia in a World Cup Qualifier. It was the biggest loss in international football history, or possibly in school playground history, or possibly in back garden history against the dog – and is now the starting point Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
There’s a faint whiff of Strictly Ballroom about Sasha Hadden’s Australian indie A Stitch in Time, another tale of people in later life rekindling lost dreams and a long-buried love while nurturing younger folk with the same passions. Here, though, this love is expressed in dressmaking rather than foxtrots and quicksteps. Hadden’s film is smaller-scale in its ambitions than Baz Luhrmann’s, not rising far above the feelgood. Which is a shame as it has an appealing central performance from Maggie Blinco as Liebe (yes, the German word for love), a repressed dressmaker in her seventies. She Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The jitters-inducing first feature directed on home soil by the Australian filmmaker Kitty Green is named after The Royal Hotel, the only pub in an Outback mining community removed from civilised society. To suggest all the blokes who drink there are potential rapists would be wrong: only 95 per cent of them are.This is bad news for the vulnerable Canadian backpackers Hanna (Julia Garner) and Liv (Jessica Henwick), who have run out of money in Sydney and taken temp jobs as the Royal’s bartenders. They've bused out on a wing and a prayer to the blasted brown terrain where it stands (a building Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
How to describe Alexander Zeldin’s latest, The Confessions? It is almost a kitchen-sink drama, but also a picaresque trawl through the life of an Australian woman that’s verging on epic, spanning most of her 80 years. And it’s stirring stuff, alternately enraging, sad and very funny. The woman is called Alice, and what we see are her adventures in the unliberated Oz of the late 20th century. As the older Alice, played by Amelda Brown, she addresses the audience directly with the house lights up, a tentative, slightly flustered woman who assures us she isn’t at all interesting. Then she Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Canberra band Teen Jesus and the Jean Teasers continue the recent tradition of Australian indie bands having unwieldy comedy names. However, their music, as laid out on their debut album, has higher aspirations, bridging their scuzzy punkin’ roots and a larger sound, loosely somewhere between The Breeders and Foo Fighters, yet very much their own thing.Sometimes they sail too far into mainstream rock for this writer but, overall, they win the day. The best of I Love You tends towards either catchy new wavey power pop guitar or snarling, sneering numbers vehemently raging at mistreatment in Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
Fans of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's timeless classic The Red Shoes shouldn’t rush to The Red Shoes: Next Step expecting a sequel. This sentimental Australian teen drama is more of a step-change than a follow-up.At least its American star, Juliet Doherty, was a professional ballerina before she took up acting – as was her Scottish counterpart, Moira Shearer, in the 1948 film – so the dance sequences feel pretty authentic, even if they’re shot in semi-darkness for some reason.The two movies have other things in common. The denouement in Powell and Pressburger’s masterful film Read more ...
David Kettle
Maureen, House of Oz ★★★★Make yourself comfortable – we’ll be here for a while. That’s what our host, 80-something Maureen, advises us several times during the course of her unhurried, hypnotically vivid reminscences of a life lived to the full. The era-defining, population-shifting changes she’s witnessed across her home neighbourhood of King’s Cross, Sydney. The teenage lover who disappeared into the turmoil of World War Two and returned changed forever. The soulmate whose death celebrations she staged with exquisite care. The little black book in which she records the dates of Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There’s been a sense of anticipation around Ghanaian-Australian Genesis Owusu ever since his ebullient 2021 debut album Smiling with No Teeth. He won a bunch of Arias, Australia’s Grammys, but could he break internationally? He’s toured the US with Paramore and is due to hit Europe in the Autumn, including a stop at Berghain.His new album is a match for its predecessor, in terms of eclecticism and bravado, and has a higher quantity of immediately hooky songs, so it shouldn't be a hindrance in taking things next level. Owusu has said that it was partially inspired by Waiting for Godot and Read more ...
Justine Elias
Keeping up with viral teenage trends is nearly impossible – they travel at the speed of light – but here’s a new one, or ancient one given an electronic makeover.In Talk to Me, the new horror movie directed by twins Danny and Michael Philippou, Australian teenagers dare each other to become possessed by the dead while their friends capture the terrifying (or embarrassing) effects on their mobile phones.Talk to Me is no simple summer roundup of cheap shocks and jump scares. Full of shadows and melancholy, the movie delivers a sharp, twisty tale of shifting allegiances among a rough Read more ...
caspar.gomez
“stay with the beer. beer is continuous blood. a continuous lover.” So said Charles Bukowski in his poem “how to be a great writer”. Who am I to argue. It’s a bright day and 11.50 AM. The sun isn’t past the yard-arm but the beer is cold and good. IPA. Finetime and I stand with Vanessa, her 18-year-old son Cody and her mate Jodie. Vanessa has a short blond crop which glows.We’re to the west of Brighton, by the sea, the outdoor enclave of The Great Escape. As in other years, the three stages are dominated on Saturday by Australian acts. We’re here to catch the first of the day in the Amazon New Read more ...