Some may roll their eyes to the back of their head like Reagan in The Exorcist at Australian YouTubers RackRacka (aka Danny and Michael Philippou) making the leap to feature filmmaking, but their daring modern horror employs its central concept of teenagers using demonic possession to get high as a thrilling and emotionally engaging exploration of grief, peer pressure and teen life in the digital age.
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You Hurt My Feelings 2023
Writing can be a lonely pursuit, and authors must often rely on those closest to them for support and feedback as they attempt to navigate the process of constructing a story. So it goes for Beth (Julia Louie-Dreyfus), a novelist who has just finished her second book – a follow-up to her reasonably successful memoir. She has what she believes to be a good marriage therapist husband Don (Tobias Menzies), until she overhears him criticising her new novel to her…
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Oppenheimer 2023
There’s something very moving about watching a film and being able to see dust motes float in the air. Or the reddened, mottled skin on the back of an actor’s neck. Or the abrasive textures of wood and fabric. Or drops of water causing minute ripples once they descend into a pond – a visual motif that receives its fiery analog at the slow burn climax of this grandiose new film from Christopher Nolan.
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My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock 2022
The writer, critic, cultural historian, hiking enthusiast and all-round intrepid man of letters Mark Cousins does himself a disservice by minimising his own redoubtable presence from his new film, My Name is Alfred Hitchcock.
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Barbie 2023
It’s a great shame that throughout the Barbie press cycle, seemingly no one has asked Greta Gerwig about Marcel Proust. The multihyphenate is an avowed fan – there’s a throwaway joke about his (literally and figuratively) heavy work in Frances Ha, and in LWLies’ 2018 interview with her, she refers to the quasi-Proustian memory experience of making the semi-autobiographical Lady Bird.
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Medusa 2021
"Hell is a teenage girl” is a statement that the group of devout young Christian women in Anita Rocha da Silveira’s highly stylised second feature would no doubt take offence at, while at the same time, would ironically go to extreme lengths to corroborate. Singing the Lord’s praises by day at a neon-soaked, flashy church, and turning into a vigilante gang roaming the streets by night, this elite group of young women known in their community as The Treasures is…
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Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis) 2022
It’s an instant extra star when Oasis mastermind Noel Gallagher turns up in a documentary as a talking head. He’s not the focus here, in Anton Corbijn’s film charting the salad days of rock album artwork maestros, Hipgnosis (aka Aubrey “Po” Powell and Storm Thorgerson). Yet his are by far the most memorable segments, most notable being one where he lambasts the cover artwork for his own multi-platinum-selling (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? as being some of the shittest ever made, and them lambasts himself for signing off on it.
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Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One 2023
Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) has a difficult choice to make. Not over whether to accept what might be his toughest and most perilous mission yet, but rather – in a surprising high-stakes twist on the Distracted Boyfriend meme – between two equally charming and dangerous brunettes, whose fates become tragically intertwined after a cyber weapon with deeply worrying implications for humanity surfaces. Some dudes just can’t catch a break.
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Elemental 2023
It’s almost 20 years since Disney acquired Pixar from Steve Jobs – in which time the company have produced some of their best-loved films, including Ratatouille, Up, and Inside Out. They’ve collected nine Best Animated Feature Oscars and count some of the biggest stars in the world among their stable of voice actors, but Peter Sohn – who previously directed The Good Dinosaur – takes things in a different direction with Elemental, a rom-com set in a universe where anthropomorphic elements (earth, wind, fire and water) occupy sprawling cityscapes and go about their daily grind.
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Shabu 2021
Shamira Raphaëla originally set out to make a film about the aspirations of four teenagers living in Rotterdam’s De Peperklip social housing complex – a striking architectural feat with a sprawling cylindrical silhouette. When one of these four youngsters called to give her the news that he probably couldn’t participate as he took his grandmother’s car on a joyride and totalled it, Raphaëla saw her film’s trajectory laid out before her.
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Smoking Causes Coughing 2022
Notably fond of deadpan dada and off-the-wall gore, director Quentin Dupieux (Rubber, Deerskin) delivers these by the bucketload in loony Super Sentai pisstake, Smoking Causes Coughing.
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Name Me Lawand 2022
Retooling a template used for The Possibilities are Endless, the wonderful and affirmative 2014 portrait of Scottish new wave singer-songwriter, Edwyn Collins, filmmaker Edward Lovelace turns his camera to teenage Kurdish refugee Lawand for a similarly-inclined investigation into a triumph against physiological and – in this instance – political adversity.