Feature Essays
The Best Films of 2018
2018 was a pretty great year for feature films. I remember saying the same thing about 2017, and it's true: it really seems to me ...
REVIEW: Jellyfish Eyes (2013)
There is a long, rich tradition of fine artists making a transition into filmmaking. It is, after all, just another medium for expression- and a primarily visual one at that. American painter Julian Schnabel made the jump with his excellent 1996 biographical drama Basquiat, before moving on to acclaimed films like Before Night Falls and The Diving Bell and the ...
REVIEW: Duckweed (2017)
Xu Tailang (Deng Chao) is a successful young race car driver who is estranged from his father Zhengtai (Eddie Peng). While arguing with his father in the car, Tailang accidentally crashes into a passing train. Instead of waking up in hospital, he wakes in 1998 to meet his father as a teenager - as well ...
REVIEW: Candleshoe (1977)
Casey (Jodie Foster) is a wayward teenager who bounces from one Los Angeles foster family to another. She is lifted from her rough life by con artist Harry Bundage (Leo McKern), who offers her a chance to get in on the criminal opportunity of a lifetime: impersonate a missing British heiress, and search the Elizabethan ...
REVIEW: The Commuter (2018)
Michael MacCauley (Liam Neeson) is a former police detective turned insurance salesman. Each day he takes the Hudson line into New York City and back again, sharing his train with a familiar group of fellow passengers. One day Michael is unexpectedly laid off from his employer. On the way home, he is approached on the ...
REVIEW: Our Time Will Come (2017)
School teacher Fang Lan (Zhou Xun) lives in Hong Kong during the Japanese occupation, and soon finds herself drawn into the underground Chinese resistance. As her war-time exploits grow and expand, it begins to affect the lives of those around her: friends, family, and particularly her doting but fearful mother (Deanie Ip). Two years ago, ...
REVIEW: Drive (2002)
A depressed businessman suffering from hypertension finds his car hijacked by three armed bank robbers. A fourth criminal has driven away in their own getaway car with their loot, and a chase begins. What ensues is a bizarre and purposefully absurd odyssey through the streets of Tokyo over a 24-hour period. The film is Drive, released ...
REVIEW: Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened (2019)
In 2017 a widely promoted island music festival in the Bahamas collapsed, leaving a raft of rich young dilettantes and social media influencers trapped in a post-apocalyptic mess of soaked-through tents, inedible catering, missing transport, and broken promises. The Fyre Festival, launched by musician Ja Rule but ostensibly organised by entrepreneur Billy McFarland, was a ...
