Jennifer Kent | 94 mins | streaming (HD) | 2.35:1 | Australia & Canada / English | 15
Essie Davis is best known for playing the sassy title role in popular Australian Christie-esque TV series Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries (for now — she’s in Game of Thrones next year), but here goes completely against type as single mother Amelia, who has to battle not only the stress of her awkward child, but also a strange storybook that may contain some kind of monster… but that would be silly… wouldn’t it?
Perhaps it’s best to not say too much about what’s going on with all that, because the film does a fantastic job blurring the lines between reality and dreams, facts and imaginings, whether it’s all happening or is all in Amelia’s head. For the majority of the film you’ll wonder: is this real? Is she being pranked? By who? A stalker? Her kid? Is she going insane and imagining it all? Sure, it’s a horror movie, so you’re thinking it’s real, but that’s what twists are for — the scares may be real, doesn’t mean the monster is.
And the scares are very real indeed. Not simplistic jump scares, but a festering tension that occasionally bursts forth in moments of specific terror. That doesn’t work for… a certain kind of viewer (to put it politely), but, for me, it makes the film far more genuinely scary, and memorably so, than being made to jump out of my seat a couple of times. Some have also criticised The Babadook for not being 100% original. Well, what is after a century of moviemaking and millennia of storytelling? What it does do is rearrange the familiar in new and terrifying ways, and tap into seams of fear that are harder to access and consequently too rarely touched by horror films. In that regard, the film it most reminded me of was The Shining — 
a horror film for people who think about what they’re watching, rather than just waiting for something to be thrown at the screen to make them jump. The slow burn tension will bore those content with the latter, who I suspect don’t tend to think a great deal (for one thing, they’d spot most of the jumps coming if they did).
Underpinning this is an incredible performance by Essie Davis. If this were merely a drama about a single mother coping with grief, rather than a genre movie, I’m sure she’d’ve been being rewarded all over the place. Again, I guess this turns off the ‘gorehound’ cadre of horror fans, but it’s the combined strength of the writing (by director Jennifer Kent) and Davis’ performance that mean the entire film is interpretable as a drama about grief and mental illness, rather than about an attacking monster or demonic possession or whatever else it might seem is going on (trying to avoid spoiling it again there!) For more on that, see this interpretation, for instance (bearing in mind it’s obviously spoilersome).
Although it’s Davis’ film, Noah Wiseman gives an accomplished performance as her kid. Well, maybe he’s too young to call it “accomplished”, I don’t know, but it must’ve been a difficult role to play — it calls for him to be a sweet little boy one minute, and a nightmare demon-child (in the real-world rather than horror-movie sense!) the next. He starts off immensely irritating — you can see why no one in the film likes him! — but he does grow on you. The next best performance is, of course, by their very cute little dog. (Do not watch this movie just because of the dog. Seriously.)
There is little in The Babadook that will make you jump, and even less that will make your stomach turn in disgust, but that’s absolutely fine. What it will do is chill your blood, make your hair stand on end, make you worry about every little creak or thump you hear elsewhere in the house after dark, and make you want to sleep with the lights on. Not just the bedroom lights, all the lights. Because once you’ve seen it, you can’t get rid of the Babadook.
This review is part of the 100 Films Advent Calendar 2015. Read more here.
From the makers of 
Iiiiiit’s the arthouse gay sex thriller!
In this regard it has a very particular speed and style — even if there was a version without copious full-frontal male nudity and explicit sex, it still wouldn’t be for everyone. It helps to evoke both a certain time and place (lazy summer days on holiday) and a particular lifestyle (that of gay cruising — which, much to the (presumably straight) policeman’s bafflement, continues virtually unabated even after one of their number is murdered in unexplained circumstances). This is further emphasised by the gorgeous cinematography. Claire Mathon apparently shot it using only natural light, and it looks fantastic — understated (this isn’t a heavily-graded hyper-real kind of beauty), but sumptuous.
The style is supported by strong performances. I suppose some would say “brave”, by which they’d mean “they’re naked a lot and having gay sex”… so, I mean, maybe it is brave, but, still, that’d be a euphemistic description. What I mean is that they’re strong because they’re calm, understated, realistic, and believable without tipping over into amateurish. You feel Franck’s complex mix of fear and excitement, his lust overpowering common sense; there’s a certain timidity, maybe even naïvety, present in his eyes. Conversely, his lover Michel is unreadable; a closed book, where you never know what he’s thinking, feeling… plotting. Franck’s new friend Henri is similarly tricky to get an accurate handle on, but he’s the yin to Michel’s yang (or vice versa). He’s not plotting, he just is. Or maybe he was plotting all along…?
Four acquaintances partake in duplicitous relationships and candid sexual discourse in writer-director Steven Soderbergh’s debut drama.
This melancholic apocalyptic comedy wasn’t too well received, which is a shame because I thought it was absolutely brilliant.
is an overwhelming sense of melancholy. It’s a hard feeling for films to evoke, I think — more complex than happiness or sadness, or excitement, or even fear. It comes to a head in an ending that actually brought a tear to my eye, a rare enough feat that it cemented a five-star rating.
Sci-fi parable about aliens controlling us via subliminal advertising.
As a Western viewer, if you know anything about Ip Man beyond “he’s the chap who trained Bruce Lee”, it’s probably thanks to the 
It helps that it’s gorgeously shot. Ultra-crisp blue-black rain-soaked night time duels; rich golden hues in pre-occupation Foshan; cold bright-white snowy landscapes; a train platform fight that’s almost sepia-like. Between the photography and the ever-excellent action choreography of Yuen Woo-ping (
However you look at it, the other Ip Man films are undoubtedly more palatable to a mainstream audience. Does that mean they’re worse? No. Better? Not necessarily. But I don’t think The Grandmaster is all it could’ve been. It seems to run out of story and lose its way as it gets towards the end. The focus shifts entirely to Gong Er, and it feels less clear what it’s meant to about as a whole film. It becomes a movie of great moments, and maybe even scenes, but an unsatisfying whole. But oh, the images…
This is not a well-reviewed film — 
It’s The Julian Assange Movie, in which Benedict Cumberbatch dons a lanky white wig and an Australian accent to portray one of the most significant figures of our times, whether you like it or not.
so I can’t really judge her. The same goes for the rest of the cast, where a wide array of starry and/or acclaimed names (Peter Capaldi, Laura Linney, Anthony Mackie, Alexander Siddig, Dan Stevens, David Thewlis, Stanley Tucci, Carice van Houten (who’s big in Belgium, 
They don’t seem to have any particular significance in themselves — they’re not famous, nor more wronged than anyone else — so maybe they’re just meant to be emblematic? As in, Laura Linney’s character is there to be representative of Assange’s effect, not the only person it happened to. Or was she the only person fired, and that’s the point? The film doesn’t make it clear.
he’s the honourable one; the one who’s actually invested in the site’s supposed values. But then the film is partly based on his book, so he would be the good guy.
Roger Ebert was an influential, respected, beloved critic for decades, and one with an interesting life: he began in old-school newspaper journalism, defined TV movie criticism, and eventually spearheaded the profession’s move online. So it merits recounting in this documentary by the director of 
