Hypnotic (2023) - Movie Review

There are few things that fill me with more delight than seeing the words “Directed by Robert Rodriguez” in big fuck-off letters on a cinema screen. I’ve gotten to the point where I would willingly watch the guy work on just about anything, but there’s something special about seeing his work on the big screen. The human lab rat turned one-man film crew who lives and breathes neo-exploitation and old-school pulp cinema, he’s the guy that marked the real turning point for my fascination with filmmaking as a creative process, and auteur theory in particular. And with his latest, a detective-led crime drama that spirals out into a government conspiracy involving psychics and the power of hypnotic suggestion, there’s quite a bit of other auteurs to be found in the construction here.

The New Mutants (2020) - Movie Review

In a year that has seen one of the biggest shake-ups in the Hollywood release schedule of all time, the fact that this movie, one most of us weren’t even sure we’d ever get, managed to come out is kind of miraculous. Of course, in that miracle lies the biggest obstacle standing between this production and success: The fact that we’ve been teased about this thing for a few years by now. Personally, I was counting my blessings that this film made it to theatrical release to begin with, and knowing how wonky the X-Men franchise has been these last several years, I didn’t really go into this with major expectations or anything. I get the feeling that that’s the best way to approach this film, as it’s honestly pretty damn good when taken on its own terms.

Kill Me Three Times (2015) - Movie Review

This might go down as one of the most bizarrely marketed films I’ve seen this year, and considering we "only just" had The Interview earlier in the year, that is saying a lot. Allow me to break down the sequence of events here: This film apparently had a cinematic release here in Australia. That makes sense; it’s an Aussie film and we’ll seemingly support any local production with a pulse these days. However, I say ‘apparently’ because I can find evidence of only one cinema that showed it, and even then it was a Q&A screening with the director in tow. Compare this to the marketing done for the DVD release, which got a colossal upgrade in terms of media attention. I have never seen a DVD release get so much cinema advert time, not to mention poster space, as this film. With this rather sporadic attempt to sell the film, and its currently abysmal approval ratings, I can only assume that this was all done as a hasty salvage operation to make sure it turned in a profit by any means necessary. Jai Courtney isn’t as big of a red flag for a film as that background. Well, let’s see if the Simon Pegg assist can rescue this film any, although I seriously kind of doubt it.