The Furnace (2020) - Movie Review

Shitty things about a nation’s history are like ants on the sidewalk: You rarely find just one of them when you start looking, and before long, you find another, and another, and then holy shit, it’s crawling with the fuckers. And over the last few years’ worth of Australian films, we’ve certainly been making a point of unearthing our own past to basically throw a spear right through the collective nostalgia. Sweet Country, The Nightingale, and True History Of The Kelly Gang looked at the colonial side of things, Ride Like A Girl wound up unintentionally exposing its own duplicity within our horse-racing industry, even Below from earlier this year took a speculative look at our recent activity with off-shore detention centres. Today’s film follows in that tradition, managing to find a whole new avenue to convey how much the British put the ‘colon’ in ‘colonialism’, with a look at Afghan cameleers.

The Call Of The Wild (2020) - Movie Review

Every so often, I find myself sitting in front of this word processor and realising that what I have to say, or at the very least the bulk of what I have to say, could just as easily be said by anyone. It’s the kind of plain-faced, right-in-your-face facet of the production at hand that is so blindly obvious, I almost feel like a rube for even bringing it up. I’m not so conceited that I see what I have to contribute in these reviews as anything tremendously vital, but I at least try to bring the one thing that no-one else can lay claim to to the table: My own perspective. Unfortunately, I doubt that means much in this case, since what I have to report back about this film is something just about anyone could point out. So let’s get that out of the way first: Wow, this is some bad CGI.