For most actors, the prospects of a lucrative Hollywood career and the lure of superstardom are enough to stick to formula and never stray far from it. The best actors, however, don’t sell tickets solely because of their dashing good looks, or because they’re starring in the latest action epic. No, they sell tickets because they seldom rest on their laurels, challenging themselves with (almost) every film by steering clear [...]

Once upon a time, I would tell anyone who’d listen that the only way to truly experience a movie is in a cinema, plonked in front of a wall-to-wall screen and encased in a circle of sound. I would tell them, unless they can spot the flaws on the faces of the flawless, they haven’t truly seen a movie. And unless they can feel the bass trembling up their spine, [...]

While we often remember key scenes or characters from the films we love, there is someone we don’t see on screen that shapes our experience the most: the director. Ron Howard once said, “One of the great things about being a director […] is that it can never be mastered. Every story is its own kind of expedition.” Only the ambitionless avoid making mistakes; the directors that aren’t [...]

The opening cries of “Nants ingonyama bagithi Baba” to a rising sun still sends shivers down the spine almost 20 years after The Lion King’s initial release. Anyone lucky enough to attend a screening during the 2011 release will likely remember the revisit for the ambience as much as the film. Children of a new generation experiencing it for the first time, feeble singing coming from the person in the [...]

Furry red monsters.  Super-powered Zebra-men. The apocalypse.

No, I haven’t been driven mad by lack of sleep. These are all things that made appearances in the films I’ve been watching over the last four days, along with a butt-naked warlord, a disgraced New York politician and about half the population of Earth. And although the days have begun to blur together as the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) rapidly approaches its [...]

Exhausting. That’s the word I’d use to describe my weekend. At this point I’m roughly half-way through my Melbourne International Film Festival experience, with the six festival films I saw over the past two days (five of them in the span of less than twelve hours!) bringing my grand total to an even sixteen overall. So without further adieu, let’s dive in to what I’ve been up to.

When you [...]