Movie & TV Show HD

Hollywood is constantly reviving old genres, only most of the time nobody notices because the movies sink without trace. Gringo - an attempt to revive classic 90s-era Tarantino knock offs like, uh, 2 Days in the Valley - is the kind of film whose presence in cinemas seems a little surprising (finally, the David Oyelowo star vehicle we've been waiting for!) until you spot Australia's own Joel Edgerton up the top of the credits. And with his brother Nash directing (in only his second film, after the underrated The Square ), this is more Aussie than half of next year's AFI winners.     Hard-working office drone Harold Soyinka (Oyelowo) is the kind of nice guy that always gets into trouble in crime movies, and here he’s in way over his head. His big-spending wife (Thandie Newton) has him in deep debt and his boss-slash-best-friend Richard Rusk (Joel Edgerton) is clearly planning to screw him over in an upcoming corporate merger. But first Harold has to take Richard and his v...

It's tempting to think of Star Wars ' Han Solo - first played by Harrison Ford and now, in his younger incarnation, by Alden Ehrenreich - as the kind of character where a little goes a long way. As a swashbuckling smuggler in the first film, he seemed piped in from another, more grown-up film. He was Luke Skywalker's cooler older brother, the guy that got the girl because he could actually talk to girls, the slightly shady guy who wasn't quite as shady as he seemed. By not being purely good or evil, he gave the Star Wars universe depth; by being charming and flawed he gave Star Wars a sense of fun. So it only seems logical to give him his own movie - and when it turns out, as it does in Solo , that an entire movie based around Han Solo isn't quite as much fun as it seems like it should be, it's just as logical to think that maybe he's a character best consumed in small doses. Thing is, there's already loads of stories built around Han Solo-esque chara...

I saw Tully a few days after visiting a pelvic physiotherapist. I've been in a lot of pain lately after abdominal surgery, and the gentle touch of this practical young woman brought tears to my eyes. Her waiting room was crammed with prams and tired, lumpy-looking new mothers. 'Up to ninety per cent of women who've given birth vaginally have some kind of prolapse,' she told me, proceeding to put her gloved fingers inside me and feel for the places where my own baby had arrived fifteen years ago. Nobody talks about this kind of damage, not really. And nobody talks about the grief and exhaustion of relentless early motherhood, except to joke about it, and say it's all worthwhile and you don't really remember the pain. Bullshit. Tully is a film written by Diablo Cody ( Juno , Young Adul t), herself a mother of three, and while it's supposedly a comedy, it's the most honest representation I've seen on screen of the despair that comes with maternal drudg...

When she’s dumped by her husband two minutes after they drop their daughter off at college, Deanna Miles (Melissa McCarthy) bounces back fast. Unfortunately her method of bouncing back is to sign up for college alongside Maddie (Molly Gordon) and finally get her degree in archeology. Deanna’s good-natured but cloying efforts to be “one of the gals” soon makes her the center of attention, especially among Maddie's somewhat quirky peers; clearly there's going to be big trouble ahead.  But this film – a reworking of the 80s Rodney Dangerfield classic Back to School so bland it's hard to figure out why they bothered – is firmly determined to avoid any trace of drama or conflict. Often it feels like all involved would rather be making some kind of "you can do it!" inspirational text for middle aged women looking to restart their lives. Which is fine, but those things aren't exactly known for bringing the laughs. So rather than picking up any of a dozen obvious plo...

Last month I was one of the Jury members voting for the Blackmagic Design Best Australian Independent Film Award at the  Gold Coast Film Festival  (17 - 29 April 2018). The prize (which includes $10,000 of Blackmagic camera equipment) was judged by four film critics from the Australian Film Critics Association: Luke Buckmaster, Lauren Carroll Harris, Cerise Howard and myself, and was won by Russian-Australian filmmaker Alena Lodkina’s impressive and poetic debut feature Strange Colours. Set and shot in the remote opal mining community of Lightning Ridge, Strange Colours has been described as an inverted response to the outback horrors of Wake in Fright . Premiering to acclaim at the 2017 Venice Film Festival, and having its Australian premiere at the Gold Coast Film Festival, it's a film that features soft silky light, dreamy-pale landscapes and benign Ocker characters. These are wizened Aussie blokes, never seen without a VB in their hands, and yet they defy expectation...

Usually when critics complain that a blockbuster lacks things like character development or decent plotting or a satisfying resolution, what they're really doing is revealing that they have no idea what a modern blockbuster is meant to do. This isn't a slam on critics of Avengers: Infinity War - it's definitely a film with problems, even judged on its own terms - but this kind of film is bought and sold as spectacle first and foremost, and complaining that it isn't narratively satisfying largely misses the point. The hook here is that this is the culmination of the last decade of Marvel movies, all 19 of them.  Obviously it's not: Marvel is great at leaving plot threads dangling at the end of one film and ignoring them in the next (were any of the plot points at the end of Captain America: Civil War ever mentioned again?). It's just another "everyone teams up to fight a really big bad guy" movie, and while it delivers on the "big", the ...

Amy Schumer plays a woman whose life is turned around when she suddenly and irrationally becomes convinced she’s gorgeous; it's not exactly the most sure-fire concept for a movie in 2018, even if you haven't been reading the various " Amy Schumer's 'I Feel Pretty' is offending women " articles doing the rounds.  But in bad news for outrage fans, the problem here has more to do with the marketing - Hollywood isn't great when it comes to selling comedies as anything more than crass high concepts - than the film itself; it turns out I Feel Pretty (okay, the title doesn't help) is actually a film in which Amy Schumer plays a woman whose life is turned around when she suddenly and irrationally becomes imbued with the kind of self-confidence most people would kill for. Yes, the film initially focuses on how fashion world underling Renee Bennet (Schumer) is bummed out by her looks – but it’s clear as she struggles through her day that the real problem ...