Lauren Carroll Harris

For its first Original film, Stan could have opted for a cleanly prescribed, commercial genre piece, as per its Wolf Creek series – clearly pitched at millennials. But the trailer that emerged in late 2017 for The Second promised something unusual: a psychological thriller defined by a love triangle between a novelist, her publisher, and an enigmatic third player – in other words, a smart, cha ... (read more)

The fate of the duo at the centre of Brothers’ Nest is inevitable from the start: the camera, with gloomy portent, looks up and idles toward their decrepit childhood home. Writer-director-actor Clayton Jacobson’s new, largely housebound crime comedy hinges on a dark homecoming: Jeff (Jacobson) has hauled his younger brother Terry (Clayton’s real-life sibling and collaborator Shane Jacobson) ... (read more)

Two-thirds of the way through Woody Allen’s new-but-not-really-new film Wonder Wheel, Kate Winslet’s nerve-shot, middle-aged tragic heroine, Ginny, turns to her younger lover, Mickey (Justin Timberlake as a living Ken doll), and says forlornly, ‘Rescue me’. I could not have composed a sadder, more apt summation of the situation of Allen’s women onscreen. A neurotic, disappointed clam-sh ... (read more)

Imagine, if you can, an elderly white man, Michael Caton, stretching his arms wide and performing an Indigenous dance as part of a traditional welcome at a summer, country-town folk festival, before delivering a sermon on the virtues of acceptance and multiculturalism to a smiling, nodding, ethnically diverse circle of music lovers. The saddest thing about this scene, from writer-director Ben Elt ... (read more)