Luke Buckmaster

In an old episode of The Simpsons titled A Fish Called Selma, the actor Troy McClure arranged a sham marriage to divert media attention from rumours of an unsavoury sexual preference: a fetish for fish. If McCLure were an actual person one might expect him to feel finally vindicated, and somewhat aroused by director Guillermo […]

There is a certain kind of logic, erroneous and superficial, that is commonly used to excuse the failings of poor quality films marketed towards children. It goes like this: such productions do not need to be ‘good’, because they are intended for children. That is essentially the same as saying these films are not fit […]

The fine Frances McDormand headlines Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri as Mildred Hayes, the mother of a murdered teenage girl who erects giant roadside signs declaring her daughter was “Raped while dying” and fingering local police for not finding the perpetrator. The buzz around the film suggests writer/director Martin McDonagh has constructed something smart, topical […]

The plan was always for the part of J. Paul Getty in All the Money in the World to be brought to the screen with an attention-grabbing gimmick. For Kevin Spacey, the original actor slated to play the Scrooge-like, larger than life character, it was conventional: a pound of prosthetics and makeup to make him […]

This year has been widely considered a bumper year for scary movies worldwide. Tracking the numbers, The New York Times labelled 2017 “the biggest box office year ever for horror”, led by the runaway successes of It and Get Out. Critics also came out in support of a range of films that gave us the […]

An eclectic array of characters graced the big screen in 2017 blockbusters, the vast majority of whom we had met several times before – a Spider-Man here, a Skywalker there. None of the ten highest performing films (with Star Wars: The Last Jedi inevitably about to push Dunkirk out of this list) were original stories; […]

When did Ben Mendelsohn become one of the world’s greatest villains? It feels like Mendo’s transformation from a squeamishly good character actor, best-known for playing an assortment of creepy criminals, to an eating-puppies-for-breakfast uber villain has been gradual. Then, POW! The bloke is popping up everywhere as a go-to guy for nefarious, cat-stroking-type baddies. A […]

The trailer for Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle generated controversy when it premiered in June. Viewers fumed that the only female character out of four leads was a sexually objectified, Lara Croft-like hottie, in nonsensical jungle attire. The cast, including the actor who plays the skimpily dressed character in question, Karen Gillan, and her co-star […]

This year Netflix doubled down on original productions, as they intend to do next year and – presumably – every year from now on, until roughly the end of time. The glut of 2017 content includes a handful of deeply compelling and topical documentaries. Subjects, ideas and observations explored in these films keeping bouncing in […]

Over the last couple of decades I’ve sat in the driver’s seat for more than my fair share of terrible, train crash interviews. Many – perhaps most – of these occasions degenerated due to a mistake on my behalf, in one way or another. But some I am still shaking my head about years later […]

What the hell is Mel Gibson doing in this movie? That is a question surely bouncing around the mind of anybody who has been assaulted by the trailer for Daddy’s Home 2, which is anybody who has watched the trailer for Daddy’s Home 2. Director Sean Anders’ unprepossessing 2015 original examined notions of contemporary masculinity […]

A great many superheros – too many to count, almost – have graced our screens since The Incredibles burst into cinemas in 2004. Most of the more famous costumed faces we had already seen plenty of times before, and the juggernauts among them (Superman, Batman, Thor etc) popped up multiple times as the CGI-splattered years […]

It will not surprise fans of Breaking Bad, or its spin-off series Better Call Saul, to be informed that actor Jonathan Banks – aka Mike, the hard-as-nails hitman and underworld problem solver – plays one creepy son of a bitch in Mudbound. In the Netflix-distributed feature film from African American director Dee Rees, his performance […]

Will somebody please whack me on the head with a bible, or a large book about Greek mythology? Paying a person to do this would probably be cheaper – and certainly more time efficient – than sitting through another heavy-handed, metaphor-clogged drama, populated by characters who are enfeebled because they exist purely in service of […]

Among the most pleasant surprises in the later years of David Lynch’s career has been the veteran filmmaker’s emergence as an eccentric character actor. Lynch’s signature on-screen presence is a kind of stiff-necked, whiny agitator, always determined to be making some kind of point. In episodes of Louie he is a comedy mentor crossed with […]

Bondage, sadomasochism, threesomes, spanking, whips, ropes, naughty nurses and horny university professors – now that is a superhero origins story. Fortuitously timed to arrive in the wake of the box office behemoth Wonder Woman, writer-director Angela Robinson explores the Amazonian arse kicker’s real-life creator in Professor Marston and the Wonder Women, opting for a left-of-centre biopic: […]

First arriving in cinemas in mid-1987, director John McTiernan’s mud-splotched action SCI-FI classic Predator – a survival in the wilderness story with a bad arse extraterrestrial twist – is now thirty years old. To commemorate the film’s anniversary, screenings of it have appeared across the country, including sessions this week in Sydney and Melbourne and […]