Andrew Nette
It has been fascinating to watch the evolution of Robert Pattinson since the role that brought him to public attention, that of the reluctant vampire Edward Cullen, in the first instalment of the syrupy teen romance franchise Twilight (2008). In a little over a decade, he has transmogrified, via a series of eclectic, often challenging roles, into a major Hollywood talent, able to hold his own with screen veteran Willem Dafoe in Robert Eggers’s psychological horror, The Lighthouse.
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Australia has not made many war films, let alone films about the conflict in Vietnam. Not counting The Sapphires (2012), the story of the all-female Aboriginal band of the same name, which includes the women touring Vietnam to entertain American troops, our cinematic output about this war is precisely two films ...
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There is a sense of tension and anticipation around any film remake, especially when the original is well known and received. So is the case with Luca Guadagnino’s version of his countryman, Dario Argento’s cult horror, Suspiria (1977). There has been intense on-line debate about the movie from the moment the ...
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Afilm sequel is always a risky venture, and thus it is with Goldstone, Ivan Sen's follow-up to his 2013 outback crime drama, Mystery Road. But it is just one risk the writer–director–cinematographer director takes with this film. Goldstone re-introduces us to the indigenous police detective ...
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Scorsese, currently showing at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne, is not exactly the exhibition that is advertised, and that is a very good thing. Martin Scorsese's career has stretched over half a century and involves nearly sixty films. Yet anyone who has seen advance press ...
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There is something alluring about the publication of a lost or unknown literary manuscript. How will it fit into the author's body of work? Is it inferior to or better than the published work? Does it illuminate a hitherto unknown aspect of the author's thinking, or make you re-examine the known sequencing or themes? These questions were on my mind as I read Fea ...
It has been intriguing to watch the culture war surrounding the James Bond franchise. Slowly mobilising for a while now, the lead-up to the latest instalment, Spectre, the twenty-fourth Bond film, and the second directed by Sam Mendes, has seen it kick up a notch. Is the character a misogynist? Is he too violent? Maybe the next Bond should be black – a de ...
It has been said we get the versions of Shakespeare that mirror our times. If so, it is chilling to speculate what Australian director Justin Kurzel’s take on Macbeth, the story of a loyal warrior who succumbs to the temptation to commit regicide, says about the current state of the world.
Macbeth, Shakespeare’s darkest and bloodiest tale, ...
Andrew Nette reviews 'Transmission: Legacies of the Television Age' (NGV)
The cover of Ray Whitrod’s re-released autobiography, Before I Sleep: My Life Fighting Crime and Corruption, strongly hints at a hard-hitting true crime memoir, dominated by the author’s troubled period as Queensland police commissioner from 1970 to 1976, when, as the blurb suggests, the state was ‘a haven for crooks from both sides of the law’. This ...