GM KJZX

20/01/2022

06/01/2022

Netflix’s new fantasy comedy combines Bojack Horseman’s visual humour, theater-kid awkwardness and some truly great musical numbers to tell the weird tale of a horse whisked away to a land of centaurs… and not just the horse kind. There are centaur moles, ficuses, cats (who seem to love Andrew Lloyd Webber, natch) and more in this cacophonously odd tale that should keep adults engaged with its sly humour while kids marvel at the silliness.

06/01/2022

Merchant Ivory turned again and again to E.M. Forster, and they must have been in sync with his convoluted prose style, because they got the tone right every time. Anthony Hopkins, Emma Thompson and Helena Bonham Carter excel in this Oscar-winning adaptation of what many consider Forster’s greatest work.

06/01/2022

Aaron Sorkin manages to pack in the sense of political and social turmoil of late-1960s America into this ferociously articulate courtroom drama about the Chicago Seven, a group of anti-war protestors blamed for rioting outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The director is on unshowy form here, letting the story speak for itself, while the terrific ensemble cast equally keep things nicely understated. Truly stirring stuff.

06/01/2022

A kinda-romcom with all the jokes and feelgood vibes replaced by existential angst and a generalised sense of foreboding? What could be more Charlie Kaufman than an impeccably-acted mindwarp of a film that starts as a simple road trip and ends as an enigma we’ll be chewing over and debating for years to come. Jessie Buckley and Jesse Plemons are a couple heading home to meet his folks (Toni Collette and David Thewlis, perfectly attuned to Kaufman’s skittish frequency), but is it all in his head? Or hers? It’ll definitely get stuck in yours.

06/01/2022

This Oscar-winning doc, made by Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company no less, has a tonne of pertinent things to say about working culture and globalisation. It follows the takeover of an Ohioan auto glass factory by a Chinese company. It should be a good news story of thousands of American jobs saved and a town’s welfare protected, but the truth is far more complicated. The question of whether Chinese and American workers can collaborate successfully takes the film from Moraine, Ohio to Fuqing, China. The answer is… well, -ish.

06/01/2022

After a brief stint in the House of Woodcock, Paul Thomas Anderson is set to return to his beloved San Fernando Valley with Licorice Pizza. As such, film fans are well advised to revisit Magnolia, Anderson’s self-indulgent and hypnotic ensemble about tenuously connected and hopelessly adrift Angelenos. Yes, it’s overlong, and no, the plot threads don’t always connect. But Magnolia is nonetheless the work of a modern master, one packed with melodrama, wry humour and powerhouse performances that run the gamut from devastating to hilarious, often within a single scene.

06/01/2022

David Bowie headlines this Jim Henson bomb-turned-cult-classic about a bratty teenage drama kid (Jennifer Connelly) transported to a magical land of goblins, flatulent bogs and friendly beasts. The Thin White Duke delivers a few show-stoppers as the central glam-goth villain, but it’s the creature design by Henson and Brian Froud that elevates Labyrinth to the upper echelon of kids’ fantasy fare, creating a fleshed-out world of scary monsters and super creeps that balances its macabre side with generous portion of whimsy and comedy.

06/01/2022

Take Shelter director Jeff Nichols dips his toes into Amblin waters with this tale of a supernaturally powered boy and his gruff father hitting the road with a backwoods cult and government agents in full pursuit. The cast is stacked, with Adam Driver, Kirsten Dunst and Sam Shepherd offering up solid support, but it’s the fraught father/son dynamic between Michael Shannon and Jaeden Martell that drives the film, resulting in a tender and dark low-budget marvel with heart and thrills in abundance.

06/01/2022

Spike Lee's breakout remains his most unfiltered masterpiece, and its narrative about racial tension centered around a Brooklyn pizza shop remains as blazing today as the heatwave-plagued city in which it's set. Few films of this era are as iconic and influential, and this cornerstone of the era's indie-film explosion remains as incendiary now as it was upon its release.

06/01/2022

Propelled by a decades-spanning mystery as unsettling as any in a David Lynch film, Sandi Tan’s gloriously personal documentary is a vivid scrapbook about growing up a cinephile and a misfit. It’s both a nostalgic throwback to ’80s and ’90s Singapore, where the filmmaker’s artistic appetite blossomed, and an emotional reconciliation with her past, which was interrupted by a shocking theft.