Film

Review Roundup: Ten Movies To See This Long Weekend

And this isn't even including Sydney Film Festival.

by Junkee 10 June 2016

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Hey film nerds, you’re in luck! If you live in Sydney, the city is absolutely packed with things to see at the Sydney Film Festival this weekend. There’s a good bet a fair chunk of it will be sold out, but there are literally hundreds of titles to choose from and we’ve compiled our 14 top picks for you over here.

If you’re in Melbourne, you’ll be able to get in on a little of this action too. David Stratton’s programmed a series of his favourite Martin Scorsese films that’ll be screening at both SFF (until June 19) and ACMI as part of the Scorsese exhibition from now until September.

If you don’t live in either of those places, firstly: congrats on your affordable rent. Secondly: we’ve made you a Scorsese-themed Netflix hitlist that would probably last you over ’til Tuesday. Here are a few more things happening on the big screen too if you feel like leaving the house at some point (please leave the house at some point):

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Hunt For The Wilderpeople

For fans of: Sam Neill, buddy comedies, New Zealand confectionary.

Wilderpeople tells the story of a 13-year-old delinquent Baker as he’s placed in a new foster care home in the bush with the loving Bella (Rima Te Wiata) and stern Hec (Sam Neill). Ricky’s repeated, pseudo-feigned, attempts at escape eventually trigger a snowballing chain of misunderstandings and, eventually Hec and himself find themselves hiking through the forest. There’s no clear destination in sight for the pair, no Mordor or Mount Doom (there is however a Lord Of The Rings tip of the hat that proved too good to resist). But there is plenty of journey.

New Zealand director Taika Waititi does it all with a distinctive voice too, made all the more enticing by its Kiwi accent. Wilderpeople takes the charm and sensibility of Boy and garnishes it with deft slapstick and playful camera trickery.

Read more: Hunt For The Wilderpeople Is A Kiwi Film We Definitely Can’t Steal As Our Own, by Lachlan Kanoniuk

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The Nice Guys

For fans of: Lethal Weapon, Ryan Gosling being a doofus, badass 13-year-old girls.

The Nice Guys concerns the life and work of Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe), a sensitive and principled thug, and Holland March (Ryan Gosling), a subpar private investigator and careworn single dad to precocious 13-year-old Holly (Angourie Rice). The pair team up, with the un-asked-for assistance of Holly, and begin to unravel a case, which they soon discover involves dodgy porn filmmakers, idealistic hippie protesters, a sexually aggressive teenager, the automobile industry, and top-ranking government officials. To explain much more would undo the noir-like twists and turns (many of them hamfisted, as the genre demands) that make The Nice Guys such a romp.

Action-comedy and buddy-comedy has inhabited an uneasy space for the past decade or so; playing with sex and violence to provide a frisson of naughtiness, but maintaining its PG-13 rating to usher as many audience “quadrants” as possible through the door… The Nice Guys deftly dismantles these tired blockbuster comedy tropes. Its humour is blunt and profane, and finds its shock value in tableaux of degradation (this is perhaps not the film for an undergrad-feminist night out) rather than, as less skillful comedies do, simply describing outlandish sex acts or body parts while remaining terrified of intimacy.

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Queen of the Desert

For fans of: biopics, questionable politics, Nicole Kidman staring wistfully into some sand.

Gertrude Bell (played in the film by Nicole Kidman) was a brilliant, intrepid English archaeologist, writer and diplomat who travelled widely throughout the Middle East, and spoke fluent Arabic, Persian, French and German, plus some Italian and Turkish. At her death in 1926, Bell was the region’s most powerful woman, and as this film’s closing statement solemnly explains, she was “one of the few representatives of His Majesty’s Government remembered by the Arabs with anything resembling affection”.

The film follows Bell from 1892, when she gets her first taste of Middle Eastern culture while visiting her uncle (Mark Lewis Jones) in Tehran as a peppy Oxford graduate, to the aftermath of World War I, as she promises the brothers Prince Prince Adullah and Prince Faisal that they will each rule their own kingdom. In between, there’s a lot of widescreen camel riding in silky headscarves, and thoughtful gazing into the middle distance. Everything and everyone in this film is so locked into dreary cliché that I yearned for T.E. Lawrence (played here, drolly, by Robert Pattinson) to derail its train.

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Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

For fans of: Tina Fey, self-discovery, having confusing sexual feelings about Martin Freeman.

Given how rare it is to see stories of women in war zones on screen, it’s a shame that the film doesn’t choose to examine these core issues in any grander detail. The film is even less interested in the race relations on screen, which is odd considering where it’s set. The locals are mostly secondary to Barker’s story, and those that are featured prominently are portrayed by actors that are most definitely not of Afghan descent.

Despite the performances of Tina Fey and Margot Robbie, and despite the unique perspective of its subject, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot never seems to be setting its sights any higher than a story of one woman’s self-discovery. It had the perfect chance to give us something fresh and new, but instead sheepishly recoils just short of the finish line.

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Captain America: Civil War

For fans of: good superhero flicks, abs, Robert Downey Jr smirking.

What you have here is, frankly, the Avengers film we deserved when Age of Ultron staggered out of wherever Joss Whedon lets his films gestate nowadays. It’s proof that a superhero ensemble film can kick unfeasible quantities of arse. It’s proof that no matter how many explosions you throw into a film, the real way to make the climax of a story hit home is to make the motivations of the characters deeply personal and human. And it’s proof that no matter what cynics — or completely reasonable people who were justifiably appalled by Batman V Superman — might think, the superhero genre is still capable of churning out stunning popcorn cinema.

Read more: Captain America: Civil War Might Just Restore Your Love Of Superhero Movies, by Paul Verhoeven

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Bad Neighbours 2

For fans of: stoner comedies, Zac Efron, surprising feminist politics.

Growing and learning in the same way as its characters — who are all anxious in moments of generational transition — Bad Neighbours 2 takes a deliberate shift in focus to give women a legitimate voice, include a realistic and respectful gay relationship and intensely focus the laughs at the dudebros it once placed front-and-centre. Does that make it a great film? Not necessarily. But, as its characters at one point explicitly attest, it sure feels good to see a bunch of bloody tampons flying around in place of the usual dicks and balls.

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Midnight Special

For fans of: supernatural mystery, Steven Spielberg, good filmmaking.

An uncharitable critic could say director Jeff Nichols is just another Spielberg fanboy, aping his hero like JJ Abrams does. Or that he’s waxing nostalgic more generally — quoting the 1980s sci-fi he grew up on, like Joe Dante’s Explorers, Randal Kleiser’s Flight of the Navigator and Nick Castle’s The Last Starfighter. In a promotional featurette, co-star Kirsten Dunst says, “Midnight Special is the kind of movie that they just don’t make anymore.”

But the reason Midnight Special feels nostalgic is that blockbuster cinema used to invest in mystery and emotion. The best films make us confront our own values and vulnerabilities, and we leave the cinema feeling energised and profoundly moved. These days, Hollywood studios rarely trust directors to make films like this, and rarely trust audiences to watch them. I haven’t loved a film as viscerally as I love Midnight Special since I saw Whiplash.

Read more: Hollywood Desperately Needs More Movies Like Midnight Special, by Mel Campbell

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The Jungle Book

For fans of: special effects, adventure, the original Jungle Book.

It’s a ramble in the jungle: a string of spectacular setpieces that largely follows the template of the 1967 cartoon, with a little bit of Lion King-style buffalo stampeding thrown in. Yes, Baloo still sings ‘The Bare Necessities’, and King Louie sings ‘I Wan’na Be Like You’ — but mainly because director Jon Favreau knows audiences are expecting these moments. The giant python Kaa’s (Scarlett Johansson) hypnotism of Mowgli, and his visit to Louie’s ‘court’ in an abandoned temple, seem to happen purely because they have before. The story of this film is its consummate technical achievement.

Read more: The Jungle Book Review: Let’s All Go Live In The Wild Immediately, by Mel Campbell

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The Boss

For fans of: Melissa McCarthy. That’s about it.

The Boss is not McCarthy’s strongest work, but only because the movie itself is not strong; the idea that only Paul Feig, who directed her in (Bridesmaids, The Heat and Spy) can unlock some sort of comedic genius in McCarthy is ludicrous. His films are objectively better than The Boss but the idea that McCarthy needs Feig’s guidance to make her funny, isn’t accurate.

The more likely scenario is that Ben Falcone just isn’t a very good director, and that Paul Feig remains one of the best comedy directors in the biz (also, one who actually seeks out stories starring female comedians). McCarthy is still funny in this film — the character she’s playing is great, but the structure around it lets her down. At the rate McCarthy is putting out movies, of course not all of them are going to be The Heat.

Read more: Meh, I’ll Watch Anything With Melissa McCarthy, by Sinead Stubbins

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Sherpa

For fans of: local documentary, making annoying Facebook friends feel bad about climbing Everest.

Filled as it is with soaring mountainous photography and beautiful sequences documenting everyday Nepalese life, director Jennifer Peedom has great respect for the region and its people. She has worked here before, having directed Everest: Beyond the Limit, Miracle on Everest (about Australian climber Lincoln Hall), and announced a narrative biopic of Tenzing Norgay, the first man to ascend, you guessed it, Mount Everest.

Certainly, this knowledge is key in her having the trust of her subject. She also gets great mileage out of interviews with some of the American climbers who — in the grand tradition of boorish idiots talking too much in front of camera — consider the protests of the locals to be selfish and are more concerned about touching the tip of Everest than the wellbeing of their lowly-paid guides who provide them with hot towels and tea every morning.

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