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25.01.2022 Michaela Coel came roaring out of the gate with her show Chewing Gum a few years back, but that show had nothing like the impact of I May Destroy You (HBO), which is almost revolutionary television. Using the 12 episode half hour format, it uses an ensemble of (mainly) Black millennial Londoners to ruthlessly examine sexual assault and the parameters of consent. It’s also, essentially, a comedy.

25.01.2022 Depending on how much you know about the Murdochs, the 3-Part BBC documentary series The Rise of the Murdoch Dynasty debuting Sunday 20 September at 7:40pm on ABC TV, and simultaneously on ABC iView will either remind you of the terrifying influence the family, and Rupert in particular, has wielded and continues to wield, particularly in relation to the national and international affairs of Australia, the UK and the USA; wake you up to some very frightening elements of their influence you may not have realised; or blow your mind.

25.01.2022 If you’re a Eurovision super fan like me you can rest easy: Will Ferrell’s ambling comedy about a pair of Icelandic entrants is not a piss-take. Indeed, it loves Eurovision: if anything, the film is a celebration.

24.01.2022 A sprawling, shaggy, thrilling, moving, very Spike Lee take on The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Da 5 Bloods is a whole lot of movie, most of it very good indeed, all of it supremely entertaining.

24.01.2022 Sofia Coppola re-teams with her Lost In Translation star Bill Murray, writing him a role he seems to play effortlessly, and his seeming effortlessness is our reward and the principle joy of On The Rocks, a New York upper-crust soufflé that goes down easy.

23.01.2022 The top 15 for 2020

22.01.2022 On Netflix are two new documentaries: David Foster Off The Record and The Speed Cubers. Both are pacy, surprising and fun.

21.01.2022 The cinemas in Australia are re-opening. In most parts of the country, some are already open. In NSW, July 2 will see the first batch open their doors. I can’t wait to get back into the cinema, and I’m not alone. Australians love movies, and we’ve got some of the best cinemas in the world to watch them in. The technical capabilities in some of the big rooms around the country are extraordinary, the seats are generally generous and cushy, and, in most of the cinemas throughout the land now, you can buy, and take into the cinema, alcohol. Our cinema experience is thrilling and civilised.

19.01.2022 Christopher Nolan’s new globetrotting espionage action epic may be the loudest movie I’ve ever seen; afterwards I craved silence, or at least birdsong. It’s also almost self-parodically convoluted. Most of the dialogue is rendered indecipherable by the seat-shaking score and sound design; the end result is essentially incomprehensible, such that I’m not going to attempt any plot summary, as, frankly, on a story level, I have no idea what I’ve just seen.

18.01.2022 It’s the 50s, in a small town in New Mexico, on a Friday night, and while the town-folk are all attending the basketball game at the high school, the local radio DJ (Jake Horowitz) and the town’s switchboard operator (Sierra McCormick) stumble upon the possibility that extraterrestrials are hovering in local skies.

16.01.2022 Like Knives Out last year, The Translators is essentially a take on the classic mystery format pioneered by Agatha Christie: introduce an ensemble of possible suspects, have a crime, toss in some red herrings and mysterious backstory, then reveal the criminal. Here, that format doubles down with the locked room mystery element, while removing a traditional detective character.

16.01.2022 My first produced play was a farce about intrigue among chess grandmasters. The climax, which I reckon was a bit of a coup de théâtre, involved the hero grandmaster facing off with the villain grandmaster over a game of chess. There was no board; the two characters stalked each other around the good guy’s living room, leaping onto furniture and barking out their moves: Queen to rook five! The entire match was played out, and if you were a deep chess person, theoretically you could follow it in your head, and it would be as suspenseful and fun as, say, the climactic sword-fight at the end of a production of Hamlet or Macbeth.

15.01.2022 Written and directed by Alex Winter Bill from Bill and Ted’s excellent adventures, of which another is coming very soon the HBO documentary Showbiz Kids lets level-headed survivors of child stardom speak with level heads, rather than revel in sordid and sad tragics and their tragedies.

15.01.2022 The focus is on the subset of survivors from Epstein’s first wave of abuse, in Palm Beach in the 2000s, and the series is respectful of them, and thank goodness, because they’ve been exploited enough.

14.01.2022 BAIT AND DEAD STILL REVIEWS

12.01.2022 Ah, to live in LA’s Laurel Canyon between 1965 and 1967, hang out with The Byrds and Buffalo Springfield, smoke reefer, and make gorgeous, melodic folk rock that went on to become known as the West Coast Sound. Bliss.

11.01.2022 On my father’s bookshelf, novels by Ross Thomas were never far from those of Elmore Leonard. I’ve read a lot of my father’s Leonard but none of his Thomas, and Thomas isn’t talked about in the same revered tones, but they’re clearly similar authors, writing about cops and crims and cons and creeps with dialect-driven humour, often in the more exotic and lawless areas of the US./ https://filmmafia.com.au/2020//11/briarpatch-lucky-grandma/

11.01.2022 Quentin Dupieux is an acquired taste, and worth acquiring. He’s known for ‘weird’ subjects Rubber, his breakthrough film, features a car tire as a protagonist but deadpan humour is truly his stock in trade.

06.01.2022 It’s the season of Alex Winter! Recently I reviewed his HBO documentary, Showbiz Kids. Now, as an actor, he’s back on the big screen in his signature role: Bill, who, with his friend Ted, famously had an Excellent Adventure and a Bogus Journey. Now, in their fifties, Bill and Ted Face The Music.

05.01.2022 Working within total realism, centred around a debut actor’s (perfectly) naturalistic performance, Eliza Hittman’s third feature Never Rarely Sometimes Always is rather sublime. Full of pure empathy and compassion throughout, it makes a thousand points well without any made didactically; it is simultaneously one of the angriest films I’ve seen this year while also being one of the quietest.

02.01.2022 SHIRLEY, WAVES AND A WHITE, WHITE DAY

02.01.2022 Another week, another well-built multi-part doco series about crime in America. In this case, Love Fraud (Showtime / STAN) is about a serial internet dater, Richard Scott Smith, who meets, woos, marries and ultimately fleeces an astonishing number of women in a surprisingly compact area (at least, in the first episode, where most of the women seem to be from Kansas).

02.01.2022 Some people love Charlie Kaufman, in the way that others love Christopher Nolan and others Quentin Tarantino. He has a distinctive voice: whether it’s solely as the screenwriter Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind, Adaptation or as auteur Synecdoche, New York, Anomalisa or now I’m Thinking of Ending Things Kaufman is grappling with very particular themes in a very particular way. And, as Once Upon a Time In Hollywood was for Tarantino and Tenet is for Nolan, so Ending Things is very, very much a Kaufman work, and will appeal greatly to those who love him while running the clear risk of alienating those who don’t. Or to put it another way: if you’ve previously not grooved with Kaufman’s vibe, you’ll probably hate this.

01.01.2022 Not to be confused with Victor Hugo’s novel, Ladj Ly’s banlieue policier is deliberately named after it, and is set in the Paris commune Montfermeil in which the Thénardiers had their inn in the book. As with La Haine, made twenty-five years ago, Ly’s debut fiction feature is about the seeds of trouble in the Paris projects, and, like La Haine, tension is built from a situation which could be avoided but which inexorably grows out of control.

01.01.2022 Armando Iannucci’s take on Charles Dickens’ novel immediately announces its intentions with its casting of Dev Patel as David: this will not be your BBC adaptation from 1990, because, for a start, we’re casting race blind.

01.01.2022 I can’t remember the last time I was as moved - nay, emotionally wrecked - by a film