Category: Film Reviews

The best way to think of Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior is if you took the original Mad Max, broke it down into its constituent parts (the Australian Outback, Mel Gibson, car stunts and leather), injected those parts with some experimental growth hormone, watched them all go crazy and then stuck them all back together. That’s a really ham-fisted metaphor, and I apologize – the point I’m trying to make is that The Road Warrior is big, bold and bloody brilliant, making its predecessor look like a weakling left behind in the dust.

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I’m an Australian, and as an Australian there are some things that are just considered part of the culture. We all love a meat pie with sauce. We were all devastated by the passing of Steve Irwin. We all know that “oi yeah nah” and “oi nah yeah” mean completely different things. And finally, for Australians, the film Mad Max is basically mandated viewing.

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 When looking at the preview for Bachelorette on Netflix, I initially assumed it would be the kind of light-hearted film that you watch on a Sunday afternoon when it’s raining and you’re wrapped up on the couch with a cup of tea. An unlucky- in-love career-woman is upset that her friend is getting married before her, but she overcomes her confidence issues to find love for herself, bolstered by the support of her two comic-relief friends (one of them sarcastic, one of them ditzy). A happy ending and a couple of safe laughs, all within the space of ninety minutes.

Boy, was I wrong.

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Have you ever had the fear of being watched in your own home? Suppose your wi-fi connection is not as secure as you thought. Maybe that webcam on your laptop is actually recording everything you’re doing. Or perhaps someone has even found a way to access your computer remotely. What would the person on the other end be doing with all of this information? Would they keep it for themselves, or would they share it online, in a place you can’t possibly access, for people you’d never want to meet in your wildest dreams? In the digital age these fears are not completely unfounded, and they are thoughts that have probably passed through everyone with a computer’s head at least once. They are also the central premise of 2018’s Unfriended: Dark Web, a sequel to the 2015 computer-screen horror film Unfriended.

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Unfriended, a horror film directed by Levan Gabriadze and released in 2015, is an unfortunate example of a good premise wasted on poor execution. Throughout the first twenty minutes of the film I was actually very impressed with both the story and the way it was portrayed. Unfortunately the hour that followed these initial twenty minutes was a definite case of diminishing returns culminating in all-out stupidity.

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Before I begin this review I feel as if I should provide a short disclaimer. As I have mentioned before, the original Blade Runner, directed by Ridley Scott and released in 1982, is one of my favourite films of all time. When Blade Runner 2049 released, helmed by new director Denis Villeneuve, I was worried that it wouldn’t, couldn’t, live up to the heights set by the original. It had been thirty-five years. Would the aesthetic that made the first film such a cult classic be able to be recaptured with a new director? Surely there was no way Blade Runner 2049 could match its predecessor.

I was wrong.

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The first time I watched Blade Runner was when I was in university. I don’t remember the exact circumstances that led me to discovering the film, but I think it was featured in one of the multitudes of “10 Sci-Fi Films You Need to See Before You Kick Off This Mortal Coil” lists, and as sci-fi is pretty much my favourite genre of anything, I was eager for a new offering to devour (the film also single-handedly introduced me to the cyberpunk genre, which has been my favourite niche ever since). This is going to sound really hyperbolic, and I’m sorry about that, but Blade Runner really was one of those films that was a turning point for me. It was a revelation.

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Factory Girl is a biopic of the life of silver-haired sixties socialite Edie Sedgwick, who was the Paris Hilton or the Kylie Jenner of America before those two were even twinkles in their father’s eyes. The plot charts the rapid rise and then the rapid fall of the troubled young woman, as she suddenly finds herself as muse for the decade’s most daring artist, Andy Warhol, and is then cast aside almost as quickly.

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Akira is a movie with an absolutely massive cult following. It’s another one of those films that for a long time I had only heard about, and because it was kind of hard to access (when I was younger, at least, before you could easily stream things online) it remained unseen and unknowable to me – like a trendy secret that I’d only seen stills from online.

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