By Simon Miraudo September 23, 2014 Jason Bateman bets on himself in Bad Words, his feature directorial debut and understandable attempt to solidify his forever-on-the-cusp-of-assured career. Longevity is not promised to anyone in Hollywood, and Bateman’s pre-Arrested Development, post-Teen Wolf Too work is a testament to that. Take solace, sir. If the flame of stardom […]
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Tag Archives: simon miraudo
There’s something about Amy – ‘They Came Together’ Review
September 22, 2014 
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By Simon Miraudo September 22, 2014 They Came Together is here to kill romantic comedies, and yet, it’s five years too late, like a Terminator who hasn’t accounted for daylight savings. The ugly truth, ahem, is that it was beaten to the punch by Katherine Heigl, who, either through her own hubris or for some […]
Continue readingSemi-charmed life – ‘Magic in the Moonlight’ Review
August 25, 2014 0 Comments
By Simon Miraudo August 25, 2014 Magic in the Moonlight sees Woody Allen putting the least amount of effort into enchanting audiences at a time when he really needs to work a little harder for their love. The public perception of Allen takes a trip on the Ferris wheel each year, and though he’s coming […]
Continue readingPlay It Again – The Birdcage
August 25, 2014 0 Comments
By Simon Miraudo August 25, 2014 Play It Again is a weekly feature in which our classic-film connoisseurs revisit a revered motion picture from the annals of movie history, to see if it holds up… or if it has aged terribly. And yes, it takes its name from a famously misquoted Casablanca line. Hey, whatever. It […]
Continue readingPlay It Again – Awakenings
August 18, 2014 0 Comments
By Simon Miraudo August 18, 2014 Play It Again is a weekly feature in which our classic-film connoisseurs revisit a revered motion picture from the annals of movie history, to see if it holds up… or if it has aged terribly. And yes, it takes its name from a famously misquoted Casablanca line. Hey, whatever. It […]
Continue readingMan, Cave – ‘20,000 Days on Earth’ Review
August 15, 2014 0 Comments
By Simon Miraudo August 15, 2014 Nick Cave, the man, the myth, the legend, reaffirms his status as those last two things, at least, in 20,000 Days on Earth. It’s a convention-busting documentary that follows the inscrutable artist on a fictionalised day in the life; his 20,000th, actually. Well, that’s what directors Iain Forsyth and […]
Continue readingVideo games – ‘Sex Tape’ Review
August 7, 2014 0 Comments
By Simon Miraudo August 7, 2014 Sex Tape tells the harrowing story of a man with such wanton disregard for his family’s financial well-being he regularly buys two iPads at a time and re-gifts the newly-obsolete models to acquaintances. There is also a subplot about the man and his wife frantically scrambling to erase their […]
Continue readingThey’re a weird mob – ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ Review
August 6, 2014 0 Comments
By Simon Miraudo August 6, 2014 Even the most casual fan could name Marvel Studios’ ten features, starting with 2008 trend-setter Iron Man and arriving at 2014’s not-so-surprise hit Guardians of the Galaxy. Where they’d be reasonably stumped is correctly identifying the villains. Names like Malekith the Dark Elf, Aldrich Killian, and now, Ronan the […]
Continue readingBrain candy – ‘Lucy’ Review
August 1, 2014 1 Comment
By Simon Miraudo August 1, 2014 God is a woman. Well, she is now anyway. In Luc Besson‘s Lucy, Scarlett Johansson goes from doe-eyed mafia pawn to all-powerful superbeing, and all it took was accidentally absorbing the intellect-enhancing drug placed beside her abdomen by a Korean cartel. The rest of us, meanwhile, have to choke […]
Continue readingRound the twist – ‘Predestination’ Review
August 1, 2014 0 Comments
By Simon Miraudo August 1, 2014 “Smart” movies can be dumb fun (Inception, Shutter Island), and “dumb” movies can be secretly smart (22 Jump Street, Spring Breakers), but movies about time travel… mostly just frustrate. They exist in some sort of netherworld, caught between smartness and dumbness, kind of like this sentence. They require rigorous […]
Continue readingFolman and Robin – ‘The Congress’ Review
August 1, 2014 0 Comments
By Simon Miraudo August 1, 2014 The Congress is where brutal reality meets impossible fantasy, Tex Avery meets Studio Ghibli, and director Ari Folman meets actress Robin Wright, resulting in, at the very least, a truly unique cinematic experience, and inspiring one genius headline. (See above.) Set in a near-future Hollywood that has no further […]
Continue readingThe Top 10 ‘Orange is the New Black’ Inmates
July 30, 2014 0 Comments
By Simon Miraudo July 30, 2014 Every sentence is a story, Orange is the New Black‘s tagline punnily promises, and it ain’t lying. Jenji Kohan’s spunky black comedy concerns the highs and lows (okay… mostly lows) of the populace in a female prison seen through the eyes of Taylor Schilling‘s Piper Chapman, a waspy, artisanal […]
Continue readingAnarchy in the W.A. – ‘These Final Hours’ Review
July 29, 2014 0 Comments
By Simon Miraudo July 29, 2014 There’s never been an end-of-days movie quite like These Final Hours before, an anything-goes orgy of grief, savagery, and sex, with just enough humanity to remind us why maybe farewelling mankind would be a shame after all. Zak Hilditch‘s major feature debut makes Perth the final destination for an […]
Continue readingThe Top 25 Films of 1989
July 28, 2014 0 Comments
By Simon Miraudo July 28, 2014 Every year is a good year for cinema, however, few can boast about having as many memorable movies – certainly ones that remain ingrained in our collective consciousness – as 1989 can. With that in mind, I dug into the Quickflix data bank to see which had been deemed […]
Continue readingDevil may care – Deliver Us From Evil review
July 21, 2014 0 Comments
By Simon Miraudo July 21, 2014 Deliver Us From Evil is this year’s exorcism movie. (Hollywood is considerate in few ways, but at least it knows to spread these things out every twelve months.) To spare us from boredom, writer-director Scott Derrickson adds the crinkle of it also being a police-on-the-beat movie, with Eric Bana […]
Continue readingApe expectations – Dawn of the Planet of the Apes review
July 9, 2014 0 Comments
By Simon Miraudo July 9, 2014 If we should take anything away from the terse title characters of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, it’s the power of brevity. So, here’s my review: Apes together strong. Sequel merely solid. (The rest is for the human readers, sticklers for protraction.) This laboriously-titled follow up to […]
Continue readingPublic frenemies – Lawrence and Holloman review
July 9, 2014 0 Comments
By Simon Miraudo July 9, 2014 More anti-human than Antichrist, Matthew Kowalchuck‘s beyond-black comedy Lawrence & Holloman asks us to revel in the largely-unsuccessful emotional torture of a jerk by a sociopath. And they said cinema had run out of heroes. Based on the stage play by Canadian Morris Panych – a fan of Neil […]
Continue readingGirl, incubated – Wetlands review
July 7, 2014 0 Comments
By Simon Miraudo July 7, 2014 Wetlands takes a gross thing, teenagerdom, and makes it grosser, which is like setting out to make an especially revolting movie about your last bout of conjunctivitis: any memory of the experience is probably potent enough. Still, credit to director David Wnendt, adapting Charlotte Roche’s controversial, conservative-enraging novel, for […]
Continue readingSay yes to the undressed – Under the Skin review
July 4, 2014 0 Comments
By Simon Miraudo July 4, 2014 Sensory experiences such as Under the Skin defy mere words, which is going to make enthusiastically recommending it a tricky task indeed. The picture stars Scarlett Johansson as an extra-terrestrial who seduces Glaswegian men as a means of harvesting their organic material, for some alien mission we’re never made […]
Continue readingPhoto sensitivity – Finding Vivian Maier review
July 4, 2014 0 Comments
By Simon Miraudo July 4, 2014 Separating the art from the artist – or the sandwich art from the sandwich artist – is sticky stuff. Maybe impossible. Inappropriate, even. But what if the art has separated itself from the artist; is lost and only found after the artist has abandoned their creative pursuits, and appreciated […]
Continue readingThat thing they did – Jersey Boys review
July 1, 2014 0 Comments
By Simon Miraudo July 1, 2014 Here’s what’s interesting about Jersey Boys (and pay attention now because little else is): the Broadway sensation and now Clint Eastwood movie, based upon the career of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, is the rare music biopic to have zero interest in the quest for artistic perfection. It […]
Continue readingThe Best Films of 2014 (So Far)
June 25, 2014 0 Comments
By Simon Miraudo June 25, 2014 The inexorable march of time continues ever forward, a crushing reminder our too brief, finite existence. Or, to be less of a ‘von Trier’ about it: Can you believe it’s almost July? The first six months of 2014 are behind us, and what do we have to show for […]
Continue reading50 first deaths – Edge of Tomorrow review
June 24, 2014 0 Comments
By Simon Miraudo June 24, 2014 Edge of Tomorrow is an ingenious action-comedy about how frequently movie heroes would actually die if they attempted that much crazy s***, and no movie hero is more notorious for doing crazy s*** than Tom Cruise. Though Cruise long ago lost his reputation as a reliable truth teller – […]
Continue readingSpring fakers – 22 Jump Street review
June 18, 2014 0 Comments
By Simon Miraudo June 18, 2014 I’d like to report a murder. The buddy-cop comedy is dead, drowned in a sea of d*** jokes by directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller. Hey, at least it died doing what it loved. In 22 Jump Street, Lord and Miller, along with screenwriters/accomplices Michael Bacall, Oren Uziel and […]
Continue readingNo country for big feet – Willow Creek review
June 13, 2014 0 Comments
By Simon Miraudo June 13, 2014 Notorious comic Bobcat Goldthwait, once the bane of any ear-haver’s existence, has been steadily building a solid career for himself as a director, but whodathunk a mostly terrifying mockumentary would wind up bettering his black comedies? His 2009 cult favourite World’s Greatest Dad boasted an incredible first act, only […]
Continue readingOne shot – Fish and Cat review (Sydney Film Festival)
June 13, 2014 0 Comments
By Simon Miraudo June 13, 2014 The first name that came to mind during Fish & Cat, a two-hour and fourteen-minute Iranian film shot in just a single take, was Samuel Beckett. The next was Shane Carruth. That was not a jump I was expecting to take. Promoted as a “slasher flick,” Fish & Cat […]
Continue readingHeartbreak kid – Mommy review (Sydney Film Festival)
June 13, 2014 0 Comments
By Simon Miraudo June 13, 2014 Xavier Dolan‘s Mommy has one of the year’s best movie moments. Two even. Maybe three. Look… it’s all great. Those who’ve seen one of the sickeningly-talented 25-year-old filmmaker’s previous works could have predicted that. His camera moves so fluidly, as if in a dream, and here, contained within an […]
Continue readingTeenage dream – Palo Alto review (Sydney Film Festival)
June 12, 2014 0 Comments
By Simon Miraudo June 12, 2014 Much wailing and gnashing of teeth awaits any film adaptation of a beloved novel, but what welcomes the cinematic retelling of a despised one? James Franco’s unintentionally-LOL-worthy collection of short stories, Palo Alto, has been condensed, refined, and infinitely bettered by writer-director Gia Coppola, who, as you can imagine […]
Continue readingBody movin’ – The Two Faces of January review (Sydney Film Festival)
June 12, 2014 0 Comments
By Simon Miraudo June 12, 2014 The Two Faces of January, based on Patricia Highsmith’s 1964 novel and set in 1962, comes from an era in which espionage thrillers needed only an enigmatic man in a linen suit to arouse suspicion. That might still be a recipe for dramatic tension in 2014. Just not this […]
Continue readingPersistence is futile – Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter review (Sydney Film Festival)
June 11, 2014 0 Comments
By Simon Miraudo June 11, 2014 David Zellner‘s Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter is a real find; a curio about a collector and obsessive made for collectors and obsessives. It begins with the camera trained on a scratchy VHS tape of Fargo, and the remainder of the movie lives up to the promise of it being […]
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