Our latest movie reviews

If the warm, funny and fuzzy Colin From Accounts represents one extreme of Australian popular culture, then Bring Her Back is its polar opposite. The second feature from directors Danny and Michael Philippou, the brothers behind Talk To Me, takes the gore and frights of their debut and ally it to an examination of maternal instincts gone batshit crazy. Anchored by a terrific Sally Hawkins, it firmly cements the Australian duo as fresh, interesting voices in the over-saturated, often cookie cutter horror market. The set-up is economically sketched: following the death of their single father, teenage siblings Andy (Billy Barratt) and Piper (Sora Wong) are sent away to live with quirky foster parent Laura (Hawkins) in a spacious, secluded cabin in the woods replete with an empty swimming pool. Because it’s never a luxurious townhouse with a fancy hot tub, is it? Laura is already a parent to another adopted, seemingly mute orphan Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips), while grieving the mysterious death of her own daughter Cathy, who was blind. Andy, who is just shy of being old enough to become Piper’s guardian, has vowed to look after his sister, who is also visually impaired, but begins to suspect their new custodian might have her own agenda. It doesn’t reassure anyone – Andy or the audience – that Laura keeps her dead stuffed dog in the living room and Oliver in a locked bedroom, or that she throws a dance party plying her underage wards with whisky. Bring Her Back doesn’t rely on...

The ‘Rebirth’ in this Jurassic World sequel’s title is apt because this seventh entry is a renaissance of sorts for a franchise that looked ready to curl up and turn to fossil. In 2022’s woeful Jurassic World Dominion the planet was shrugging at its proliferation of dinosaurs – and it was easy for cinema-going audiences to do the same. How depressing to watch the awe Steven Spielberg summoned back in 1993 vanish in a globe-spanning story where most of the globe was done with dinos. How, the inner eight-year-old in us wanted to scream, could anyone be bored of dinosaurs? In a dinosaur movie? Some of that dino-fatigue plays into the laborious opening stretches here. Big beasts shamble though the Big Apple and New Yorkers just beep their horns and grumble about the tails in their tailbacks. Happily, director Gareth Edwards (The Creator, Godzilla) OG screenwriter David Koepp (Jurassic Park and The Lost World: Jurassic Park) soon pivot back to where the humans-messing-with-nature premise works best: on a tropical island overrun with hungry prehistoric beasties.That long-winded prelude does fill in the odd handy blank: to survive, the dinosaurs have mostly retreated to the jungles and seas near the equator, no-go areas for humans. There, a small group of adventurers must venture on the dime of Rupert Friend’s slimy exec. His pharma company is on the hunt for a potential cure for heart disease that’s carried in the blood of three dino species. Scarlett Johansson and Ali...

Having a bunch of tech tycoons getting set upon by killer AI dolls feels like an easy win for Hollywood right now. Who doesn’t want to see thinly veiled versions of Sam Altman and Elon Musk trying to fight off the psychotic fruits of their labours? Form an orderly queue, then, for an unceasingly silly and consistently entertaining sequel that delivers more – quite a lot more – of the knowing, campy shocks that made 2023’s original a box-office hit and TikTok sensation.  2.0 picks up a little after M3GAN left off. The murderous robot girl-doll has been vanquished; its creator, repentant toy inventor Gemma (Allison Williams) has emerged from a stretch in prison vowing to bring kids’ tech usage under control, with some help of a non-profit run by eligible altruist Christian (SNL’s Aristotle Athari giving major ketamine). Meanwhile, Gemma’s niece, Cady (Violet McGraw) has learnt some key life lessons from her doll friend’s kill spree. Namely: be more like Steven Seagal. Even her newfound martial arts skills can’t help her, or her aunt, when a power-lusting tech baron (a scene-stealing Jemaine Clement) and the FBI come knocking – the latter looking for help to track down a rogue militarised AI doll called AMELIA (Ivanna Sakhno) made with Gemma’s designs.  Luckily – or unluckily – M3GAN is still out there in the ether, initially as a Siri-like presence, then in a winningly daft twist, reembodied into a sulky robot companion toy, and finally as a upgraded version of her old self....

There’s a protocol you can count on to follow a public disaster in this country. It tends to begin with a years’ long and expensive inquiry, and end with little change and none of the responsible parties being held to account. Some, if they’re lucky, may even find themselves elevated to the House of Lords.  That establishment playbook is in operation again in this poignant, winding and righteously angry documentary about the Grenfell tower fire – just as it was in ITV’s Mr Bates vs The Post Office or Disney+’s 7/7 drama Suspect.  Directed with forensic skill and lots of compassion by first-timer Olaide Sadiq, Grenfell: Uncovered holds the survivors of the fire in one hand, honouring their anger and grief in moving interviews, while using the other to slap down the many companies and governmental bodies whose decisions led to the loss of 72 lives on the night of June 14, 2017. The title, of course, has a poignant double meaning. The aluminium cladding applied to the residential tower block for aesthetic reasons – supposedly to satisfy Grenfell’s well-heeled neighbours in the borough of Kensington and Chelsea – turned a small kitchen fire into a building-wide inferno, transforming the Fire Brigade’s ‘stay put’ policy into a death sentence for residents.  This is a poignant, winding and righteously angry documentary Sadiq pieces the night of the fire back together using audio from the emergency services, news footage, and the shakycam videos of locals. The shock and dawning...

It’s been 23 years since Danny Boyle’s infected horror 28 Days Later changed the game for zombie flicks, and the genre has mutated plenty in the interim. The Walking Dead, The Last of Us, even Game of Thrones have prestige-ified the undead, building emotional human survival dramas around this gnawy-bitey brand of body horror. Which might explain why Boyle and returning 28 Days screenwriter Alex Garland have seen fit to spin their return to Rage virus-ridden UK into a two, possibly three, part saga. Time will tell if it’s a wise call, but from its jaw dropping opening, in which the infected apocalypse plays out over an episode of Teletubbies, this first salvo is a mostly propulsive start.   Things have changed a lot in 28 Years Later’s Britain too. The Channel Tunnel has been sealed off and the UK officially Zomb-xited from Europe. Naval patrols enforce a seaborne quarantine. Bows and arrows have replaced guns and ammo for the grizzled survivors gathered in a Lindisfarne community connected to mainland England by a tidal causeway.  From this folksy, Summerisle-like commune, dad Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and his 12-year-old son Spike (Alfie Williams, a real find) head off on an ultra-violent rite-of-passage to hunt infected on the mainland. Mum, Isla (Jodie Comer), is bedridden with an ailment no one has the expertise to diagnose. Awaiting them are new species of infected, including the formidable Alphas and ‘Slow-Lows’, icky, blubbery zombies who crawl on their bellies. ...

Loosely doing for Days of Thunder what Top Gun: Maverick did for Top Gun, and filling a big Top Gear gap for your dad in the process, F1 is the Jerry Bruckheimiest thing to hit our screens in an age – and it’s a full-throttle triumph. The ’90s are officially back and they’re really, really loud.  With Brad Pitt engaging A-list god mode, a booming Hans Zimmer score, a crateload full of pop and dance bangers, and writer-director Joseph Kosinski hitting the same punch-the-air beats as his superlative 2022 Top Gun reboot, it’s a throwback to simpler days when multi-dimensional characters were a luxury no one could afford, because they’d spent all the money on helicopter shots. But switch off your brain and F1 will overwhelm your senses with spectacle, sonics and just enough human drama to hold it all together.  A sport so in love with its soapy dramatics, its team chiefs were bitching about each other at the premiere of this movie, the gleaming, hermetic world of F1 isn’t a natural fit for Pitt’s languid charisma. Which is ideal, because his impulsive veteran racing driver, Sonny Hayes, isn’t either.  When we meet him, Sonny is an ex-F1 superstar with a troubled past and a transient present as a driver-for-hire at Daytona. His old pal and F1 team owner Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem, bringing his A-game to a B-grade character) has a proposal for him: help his struggling team finish the season in something other than disgraceful fashion, and stave off the vultures on the board...

Be warned: despite its glossy cast and slick marketing, Materialists is not a romantic comedy. As to what it is instead, not even its creator seems entirely sure. At first, writer-director Celine Song (Past Lives) appears determined to turn genre conventions inside out: to expose romance as the soulless simulation it often seems to be. So, in classic romcom tradition, our heroine Lucy (Dakota Johnson) is a pragmatic matchmaker so successful in juggling dating algorithms that she's celebrating her ninth client wedding. And it's at these nuptials that she meets Harry (Pedro Pascal), a financier her industry considers a ‘unicorn’: handsome, wealthy, and tall. (Lucy's clients, like the film itself, fetishise male height and female youth, so if you are a man under six feet or a woman over 30, prepare to feel vaguely unworthy.) Coincidentally, Lucy’s ex-boyfriend John (Chris Evans) is also at the reception. But while Harry is a guest, John is a waiter. And therein lies her dilemma: does our material girl choose love or money?  For a while, Lucy enjoys the fancy restaurants, enormous bouquets and easy life that Harry offers. But Lucy's Cinderella story hits midnight in a jarringly dark manner, when a client experiences unexpected tragedy. And suddenly, Lucy wonders whether John – with his two roommates, lack of savings, and uncertain future – might actually be the stronger prospect. Like any good matchmaker, Song wants to give her audience everything it desires Song has,...

This thriller ‘from the world of John Wick’ has been a long time in the making: over three years since its leading lady was announced and eight since the script was first optioned following reshoots and reports that franchise creator Chad Stahelski took an active hand alongside director Len Wiseman. Happily, it emerges at last with enough inventive action to stand alongside its murderous predecessors, and makes Ana de Armas into a likeable assassin hero – a phrase that makes more sense in her killer-filled world than our own. She plays Eve, a girl orphaned by Gabriel Byrne’s Chancellor. She is raised under the care of Anjelica Huston’s director at a ballet school-stroke-assassin training academy, learning arts both delicate and deadly. But Eve never planned to simply make her living punching people’s tickets: she has vengeance in mind. So far, so standard revenge plot: a nice twist here is that when her desire threatens all-out war between her tribe and the Chancellor’s, Keanu Reeves’ John Wick is pressed into action to stop her. There’s a bit of business with Norman Reedus, as a defector from the Chancellor’s cult, and Catalina Sandino Moreno as a rival assassin, but that’s largely beside the point. Any Wick-adjacent film comes with the expectation that extreme violence will be dispensed and kill shots administered with abandon, and there this film eventually delivers. After a faltering first mission, Eve gets the hang of things, as demonstrated wittily via the bloody...

Haneke's adaptation of a novel by Elfriede Jelinek may be shot, edited and performed rather more conventionally than most of his work, but in many ways it's no less confrontational or transgressive than, say, The Seventh Continent or Funny Games. If the latter was a chaste but provocative variation on the violent thriller, this puts the porn movie through much the same paces, refusing to provide explicit titillation even as it explores the psychopathology of a professor of music, touching 40 but still so oppressed by her tyrannical mother, with whom she still lives, and by the disciplines of her vocation, that her only acquaintance with emotion and eroticism comes from watching porn. Then, into her sad life comes a young student, who falls for her. No conventional redemption ensues, as the pair slide slowly but inexorably into a relationship so painfully twisted it would be implausible, were it not for Haneke's rigorous intelligence and Huppert's controlled and courageous performance. Ambitious, profoundly articulate, and despite its avoidance of sentimentality and sermonising, very compassionate.

The title of Kelly Reichardt’s (Certain Women) bone-dry art heist comedy, set in the ‘70s of Vietnam War protests and waterbed sales, is strictly tongue-in-cheek. Not only is he not a mastermind, Josh O’Connor’s unemployed Massachusetts carpenter James Blaine ‘JB’ Mooney would make Fargo’s Jerry Lundegaard look like the last word in criminal competence.  Mooney plans to steal four abstract – and fairly low value – portraits by modernist painter Arthur Dove from his local gallery. We see him scoping out the place, observing the snoozy guards and using his wife (Alana Haim) and sons (Sterling and Jasper Thompson) as cover as he figures out all the angles and nails down a watertight scheme to lift the art. And the actual plan? To grab the paintings, stick them in a bag and leg it. It’s executed with the help of a gormless local contact and a hot-headed last-minute ringer who brings a gun and starts pointing it at screaming kids. To add to the tragicomic vibe, their getaway vehicle gets stuck in traffic on the way out.  Based loosely on a real-life 1973 heist of Massachusetts’s Worcester Art Museum, it’s the kind of material from which the Coens would spin a blackly comic tale of betrayal, murder and cosmic justice. But Reichardt’s interest lies in a more existential kind of unravelling. As the cops circle, more serious criminals start sniffing around, and Mooney’s circuit court judge father (Bill Camp) and exasperated mum (Hope Davis) read about the story in the papers,...