Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil And Vile (2019) - Movie Review

In light of certain… takes that have cropped up in regards to Todd Phillip’s Joker, a film we’ll be getting to once it makes it to Aussie cinemas, I want to reiterate something: Films should be allowed to have lead characters that aren’t good people. Narratives about seedier characters, whether they’re born primarily from a writer’s imagination or varyingly based on real-life deplorables, can make for great works of art, let alone film.

Crawl (2019) - Movie Review

In a year where the biggest hitters have been culminations of several years’ worth of production work-up, films like this are easily cherished. These low-stakes, high-tension B-movie genre exercises where the focus is placed more on making the audience feel something rather than just see something. It follows in the footsteps of previous review subjects like The Shallows in pitting a tough and determined woman against the forces of nature, and much like Shallows, the under-90-minute run time means that there’s no time to waste time. And the end result is a very taut, very gripping, very wince-inducing offering.

Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials (2015) - Movie Review

With the Hunger Games drawing to a close at the end of this year and the Divergent series only getting worse with each instalment, the third-wave of YA adaptations may soon be reaching its conclusion… or, at least, we can only hope lest we have to sit through the same darkly shot post-apocalyptic analogies for high school for another three bloody years. However, it seems that we may be able to squeeze at least one more good series out of the fad: The Maze Runner.

2014’s The Maze Runner, in my not-so-humble opinion, is easily one of the most underrated films of the year, if not of the entire wave. It’s probably one of the few times that the attempts at analogy with these films has panned out, as the plot works as a surprisingly nuanced, if flawed, fable on the transition from adolescence to adulthood: Venturing out into the unknown, leaving your old ways behind you, discovering the opposite gender in a new light; coming from a bunch of first-time writers under a first-time director, this is kind of astounding. As such, other than the complete surprise of John Wick, this was the film that I have been most looking forward to a sequel to; with how cynical I can be when it comes to my own expectations, it’s rare that I genuinely anticipate a good film these days. So, how does this sequel turn out?