Our latest movie reviews

The kids are not alright. Or, at least, that’s one takeaway from Halina Reijn’s smart second feature Bodies Bodies Bodies. Over a stormy weekend in a suburban mansion, seven new and old friends (and frenemies) play a murder-mystery game. When one of them ends up dead, everyone is a potential suspect as paranoia and inebriation lead to revelations of secrets and lies. It may sound like a familiar premise but I guarantee you haven’t seen this movie before.  Somewhere between a slasher, a whodunnit and an R-rated teen comedy, Bodies Bodies Bodies skewers and satirises uber-rich Gen Z-ers: from their attempts to distance themselves from their privilege, to their slang and outsized egos. And while the verbiage involved in that criticism occasionally feels contrived, every word is carefully chosen so that the target of this satire is clear. And that target encompasses David (Pete Davidson), whose family owns the house, his actress girlfriend Emma (Chase Sui Wonders), vapid podcaster Alice (Rachel Sennott), her older boyfriend Greg (Lee Pace), mysterious Jordan (Myha'la Herrold), newly sober Sophie (Amandla Stenberg), and her shy girlfriend Bee (Borat 2 breakout Maria Bakalova), who struggles to connect with the wealthy group. The film zeroes in on the lessons the next generation of one percenters have learned from their parents, their peers and the internet: how to get what you want; how to garner sympathy; how to cast blame onto others; and how to survive even that comes at the pr

In any other situation, the absurdity of a ten-year-old standing in the school playground haggling over the phone to secure baby items from a perplexed Gumtree contact, unseen and unconvinced at the other end of the line, would play as broad comedy. But in Slovenian-Australian filmmaker Sara Kern’s beautifully realised feature debut Moja Vesna, this moment, alongside many others, will rip out your heart and dance on the sorry fragments. Expanding on the writer/director’s award-winning short Vesna Goodbye, this Melbourne-set melancholia unfurls in the outer suburbs. Moja (magnificently expressive newcomer Loti Kovacic) is almost single-handedly trying to keep her family together in the wake of the unseen death of her mother, a tragedy she chooses not to acknowledge. When pushed to do so, she sinks into a sort of fugue state that can only be managed by repeating out loud the sort of disaster response instructions you’d learn if you were the fire warden in an office building. While it’s painful to witness these quiet collapses, Moja is handling things far better than those around her who should rightfully be guiding her through this unspeakable moment. Older, though still young, sister Vesna (Mackenzie Mazur) is pregnant – hence Moja’s quest for baby clothes – and in freefall. Chain-smoking her cares away while performing spoken-word poetry haunted by dark imagery of spiders and scars, Vesna will no more confront the reality of her pregnancy than Moja will face the loss of their

Chip into the dark crust surrounding an opal, stare into its iridescent heart and it looks as if you’re gazing into the cosmos. Burning with the majesty of a rainbow, this unearthly-looking gemstone could have fallen from the stars, but was actually forged in the dirt below our feet over millennia. The mysterious qualities of this highly prized find have long drawn prospectors to the barren places where it can be mined, like the otherworldly moonscape of ocker outback town Lightning Ridge in north-western New South Wales. The perfect setting, then, for Melbourne-based, Russian-born filmmaker Alena Lodkina’s mesmerising debut feature, Strange Colours (2017), magnifying the emotional impact of this unforgettable tale about an estranged daughter trying to reconnect with her absentee father. One of the strongest Australian debuts in recent years, it set an impossibly high bar for Lodkina to follow. While sophomore feature Petrol certainly glints unusually, it’s not quite cut from the same rich seam, even though it is the more ambitious movie. Debuting at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland before competing in the Melbourne International Film Festival’s (MIFF) inaugural Bright Horizons award, it’s knowingly playful with the filmmaking form. Lodkina casts Bump star Nathalie Morris as Eva, a film school student trying to lock down inspiration for her grad movie. While working on the sound recording of a vampire flick shot by the sea, she falls under the spell of enigmatic star

Sick of Myself, a Norwegian film by Kristoffer Borgli, opens on bored cafe waitress Signe (Kristine Kujath Thorp) and her conceptual artist boyfriend Thomas (Eirik Sæther) sitting in a fancy restaurant, supposedly there to celebrate her birthday. Thomas orders an eye-wateringly expensive bottle of wine; he is casual, yet just performatively embarrassed enough in his requests for the waiter to keep the price quiet, that he almost gets away with his plan to steal the wine in a dramatic runner – if only his girlfriend Signe didn't get so entranced with the public attention of a birthday cake arriving, that she ends up spoiling the plan. Signe agrees to humour Thomas' kleptomaniac ways, sticking to the original plan post-cake, but only if he allows her to claim that she was the one who stole the wine – for the chance to centre herself as the hero of the story at a house party later on, of course. Signe and Thomas are that couple; always competitive, eye-rollingly sucking the life out of every party conversation with their self-aggrandising personal anecdotes about their mostly-average life. That is, until Thomas achieves minor fame with his sculptures made from stolen designer sofas. Signe is furious and intensely jealous. A dog attack outside her cafe sparks a sick urge; Signe sees in this bleeding woman what she has been seeking all along – sympathy, attention, importance. But she has tried it all before, including a disappointing attempt at faking an allergic reaction to nuts

In the southwestern corner of South Dakota is Pine Ridge, one of America’s largest Native American reservations — and one of its most impoverished. Here, the per capita income is less than $8,000 and the poverty rate sits squarely above 50 per cent. It’s a stark and challenging environment, and it’s also where directors Riley Keough (Zola, American Honey) and Gina Gammell have set their gritty coming-of-age film, War Pony.  You may know Keough as the granddaughter of legendary rockstar Elvis Presley, but with this compelling co-directorial debut, it’s clear that Keough is on a mission to carve out her own path in Hollywood. The story here centres around two young Lakota boys: 12-year-old Matho (LaDainian Crazy Thunder) and 23-year-old Bill (Jojo Bapteise Whiting), who attempt to survive and find joy in a place that’s essentially devoid of opportunities. Precocious Matho is obsessed with magic, has a crush on a girl from school and loves skateboarding and video games, while Bill is a flirt who loves hip-hop, smoking weed and finding ways to make a quick buck. They’re typical boys with typical interests, but beneath this veneer of playfulness and normalcy, they’re faced with the systemic issues commonly present on reservations: racism, abuse, drug use, hunger and extreme poverty.  War Pony is at times unflinchingly gritty, reminiscent of other coming-of-age films like Mid90s and Kids that display the resilience of children dealing with issues way above their paygrade – but that

Back to the Future first introduced the idea to mainstream cinema audiences that if you go back in time and interact at an event, a new future will be created – and not necessarily for the better. In a nutshell, that's the conceit of Irish director Andrew Legge’s debut feature film LOLA, even if it arrives at this ‘science’ in a somewhat convoluted manner. An intertitle explains that in a house in Sussex, some movie reels were found dating from 1941. How very Blair Witch Project. But, with its counterfactual twists, this is more like Robert Harris's ‘Fatherland’. In 1938, two female inventors, Martha (Stefanie Martini) and Thomasina (Emma Appleton), switch on LOLA, a machine that sees future British TV transmissions. Rather delightfully, the duo care more about pop stars David Bowie, Bob Dylan and Nina Simone than they do about the heinous societal structures that informed their music. They steal music from the future to pass off as their own and bet on the horses to make a living. Twenty-three wins on the spin mean they don’t have to work again. Gee-whizz. Aesthetically, it’s as stylised as Darren Aronofsky’s monochrome Pi. Cinematographer Oona Menges's black-and-white images are overlaid with designer scratches and the archive TV footage grainy. As we learn about the machine, it promises to be joyous and entertaining, but it’s a false dawn. Before you can say ‘blitzkrieg’, soldiers arrive and it turns into a standard ‘save England from the Nazis’ caper. The premise’s limita

For a series that has only managed one fun film and three poor sequels (plus two really poor spin-offs), the Predator franchise has proven remarkably resilient. What most of the entries have got wrong is to try to over-complicate things. The predator is not a complex creature, just a very violent, very hard-to-kill monster. What director Dan Trachtenberg gets so right with Prey is to make that the entire plot: how does someone with no guns beat a killing machine with alien technology? With great ingenuity and a high body count. Taking place long before the events of the other films, this is no prequel – it stands alone. Set in the early 1700s on the Great Plains of America, it centres on a young Native American woman, Naru (Amber Midthunder). Raised to be a healer, Naru wants to be a warrior, like her older brother, Taabe (Dakota Beavers), but tradition forbids it. When Naru sees a strange craft in the sky, she begins a hunt for a creature nobody believes exists. Until it starts slicing them all into bits. That’s really as complex as it gets. Its plot is Naru, a woman whose most advanced weapon is a little axe, learning how to overcome a hulking monster who has all sorts of lasers, explosives and cloaking devices at its disposal. Trachtenberg has form in taking a simple set-up and wringing out almost unbearable tension. His last, and only other, film was 2016’s 10 Cloverfield Lane, in which a young woman tries desperately to escape a bunker in which she was trapped with her k

There’s a bit towards the end of this glossy action-thriller where Brad Pitt is pummelling a goon with a fire extinguisher. The ill-fated man takes several blows to the face before Pitt’s operative-for-hire Ladybird nozzles him with some foam for good measure, before resuming with the head-bashing. By this stage in Atomic Blonde director David Leitch’s latest slice of high-octane hokum, you will absolutely know how the man feels. Bullet Train leaves you so punch drunk from its smart-aleck plot twists, matey-matey cameos and inconsequential dust-ups, you can barely absorb the weightless, CG-drenched OTT ending.   The setting, a high-speed Shinkansen from Tokyo to Kyoto, is a lot smoother than the storytelling. Aboard this sleek locomotive are a loosely connected group of violent professionals: some looking for revenge; some on a job that will spell death for their fellow passengers; some babysitting the son of a ruthless Russian mobster called the White Death (Michael Shannon). Oh, and slithering around somewhere among them is a deadly snake.Into this combustible, complex mix comes Pitt’s snatch-and-grab man Ladybird, who just needs to pick up a briefcase and get off the train. Ladybird is fresh from therapy and on a mission of personal growth, and the movie star has fun with his reluctant use of violence and fondness for a self-help aphorism. Bullet Train takes obvious inspiration from Tarantino in its (wildly overused) flashback structure, quirky music cues (shout out to Eng

Loosely based on the life of Gustave Eiffel (Romain Duris), the 19th century engineer responsible for the world-famous tower which bears his name, this schmaltzy historical drama poses a what-if scenario. In keeping with Paris’ reputation as the capital of romance, the film proposes that Gustave’s reason for committing to building a 300-metre-tall tower was because of a run-in with his old flame Adrienne Bourgès (Emma Mackey) after 20 years. He’s now a widowed dad, while she’s married to a sour-faced rich guy. But despite the lingering memory of a painful separation, old feelings gradually rekindle. Gustave and Adrienne are quirky idealists bristling against a stuffy bourgeoisie. He’s a man of the people; she’s an inquisitive soul who pores over engineering books. They’re first introduced in flashback, when she’s a teenager arguing with her father over her decision to wear trousers (sacré bleu, a woman in trousers!). Mackey often gets compared with her Barbie co-star Margot Robbie, but here it’s Keira Knightley she calls to mind. As an unhappily married woman she channels Knightley’s turn in Anna Karenina, while flashbacks bring to mind the headstrong Elizabeth Swann from the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. It is perhaps unfair on Mackey to make these comparisons but is only because the performances by the two leads are rather rote, while the supporting cast are completely forgettable. Duris is more rousing with his workers than in any of the ostensibly smouldering scenes

It’s only fitting that Emer Reynolds’ Joyride opens in a bustling Irish bar, because suspending disbelief for this madcap caper definitely requires the kind of open mindedness that only multiple Guinnesses will provide. Plucky 12-year-old Mully (Charlie Reid) doubles as a waiter and human jukebox at his father’s pub, belting out Broadway classics to raise money for a charity in honour of his late mother. After discovering his father’s nefarious intentions to misuse the donations, Mully makes a break for the nearest getaway vehicle, only to hit the gas and discover a woman passed out in the backseat with her baby. Unsettled by the prospect of motherhood, boozy solicitor Joy (Olivia Colman) plans to give the baby away to a family member and get on a plane to sunny Lanzarote to escape her woes. In an inexplicable turn of events, Joy forces the young boy to drive her across Ireland. The car ride that ensues features a series of predictable getaway tropes, including evading the police, running out of petrol and getting on each other’s nerves. The barrage of silly one-liners sells Olivia Colman short If you’re able to look past the police’s bizarre inaction, Mully’s implausibly excellent driving skills and the schmaltzy score, there are moments of fun to be had. Colman and Reid make a believable surrogate mother-son pairing, with the Oscar-winner predictably great at capturing a mum in the throes of postpartum depression, but the barrage of silly one-liners that follows sells her