Things to do in Melbourne this week

The story follows Dever and Feldstein's characters, two academic superstars and best friends who, on the eve of their high school graduation, suddenly realize that they should have worked less and played more. Determined never to fall short of their peers, the girls set out on a mission to cram four years of fun into one night.

Rob Dolan Wines is teaming up with the crew at the Farm Yarra Valley for a film screening with a twist – you can now see a film inside a working wine cellar. On Friday, July 19, you’ll be able to see Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper in A Star is Born in the cosy barrel room of Rob Dolan Wines. This Yarra Valley winery will be offering meals from the Farm Yarra Valley, wine, beer, and cheese from local Yarra Valley producers. Doors open at 5.30pm with the screening starting at 7.30pm. Bookings are essential, and tickets are $35.

Monte (Robert Pattinson) and his baby daughter are the last survivors of a damned and dangerous mission to the outer reaches of the solar system.The crew death-row inmates led by a doctor (Juliette Binoche) with sinister motives has vanished. As the mystery of what happened onboard the ship is unraveled, father and daughter must rely on each other to survive as they hurtle toward the oblivion of a black hole. A staggering and primal film about love and intimacy, suffused with anguished memories of a lost Earth, High Life is a haunting, thrilling achievement from visionary director Claire Denis

Turns out, Pixar’s sentient toys can still make us cry. Nearly 25 years after their debut, the sweetly selfless plastic pals return in a fourth Toy Story, one charged by the animated series’ thematic essence of finding purpose in being useful to others. It’s a hopeful, immensely human chapter that echoes the franchise’s complex notions of loyalty, displacement and self-worth, doing so with humour and warmth. Working from a script by Andrew Stanton and Stephany Folsom (as well as six other story contributors, including ousted ex-Pixar chief John Lasseter), director Josh Cooley successfully balances all of these elements – a noteworthy achievement considering the large cowboy boots he had to fill after the epic yet nuanced Toy Story 3, one of Pixar’s perfect achievements. The reliable company of old friends certainly helps: now happily living with a new kid, Bonnie (voiced by Madeleine McGraw), Tom Hanks’s pull-string pardner Woody, Tim Allen’s devoted Buzz Lightyear, Joan Cusack’s feisty Jessie and the rest of the gang are back. New to the clan is Forky (Veep’s Tony Hale, adding nervy personality and genuine weirdness), an existentially confused spork with low self-esteem that the ever-imaginative Bonnie creates as a kindergarten craft project. Convinced of his status as trash (an unusually raw class dilemma for a Pixar movie), Forky get a crash course on his toyness from Woody, himself thrown by a life crisis resembling that of a retiree. Bonnie has moved on to other favori

From Disney Live Action, director Jon Favreau's all-new -The Lion King- journeys to the African savanna where a future king is born. Simba idolizes his father, King Mufasa, and takes to heart his own royal destiny. But not everyone in the kingdom celebrates the new cub's arrival. Scar, Mufasa's brother -and former heir to the throne- has plans of his own. The battle for Pride Rock is ravaged with betrayal, tragedy and drama, ultimately resulting in Simba's exile. With help from a curious pair of newfound friends, Simba will have to figure out how to grow up and take back what is rightfully his.

From Noma to IKEA to the principles of hygge, the influence of Scandinavian culture continues to grow. So too the Scandinavian Film Festival, which returns this July for the sixth year, bringing the best of northern European cinema to audiences around Australia. Fans of Nordic noir will have plenty to celebrate this year. The fourth and final instalment of the Department Q series, The Purity of Vengeance, will screen, reuniting actors Nikolaj Lie Kaas and Fares Fares. The previous three gripping instalments will get an encore screening too: The Keeper of Lost Causes (2013), The Absent One (2014) and Conspiracy of Faith (2016). The late Steig Larson did much to bring the pleasures of Scando-crime into popular consciousness with his Millennium novels. A new documentary, Stieg Larsson: The Man Who Played with Fire, offers an insight into the author’s archives, to reveal his crusading work as a journalist investigating extreme right-wing groups in Sweden. You'll also get a chance to see the Swedish Millennium trilogy: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009), The Girl Who Played with Fire (2009) and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (2010). Opening night film is the Danish comedy Happy Ending, in which Helle (Birthe Neumann) looks forward to her husband’s retirement only for him to tell her he’s starting a new career that will see him commuting to France. From Iceland comes A White, White Day, about an off-duty police chief who begins to suspect a local man of having had an

Review by Joshua Rothkopf “I didn’t think I would have to save the world this summer,” says a near-terrified Peter Parker (Tom Holland, still charmingly dorky in an Anton Yelchin vein) near the front end of Spider-Man: Far from Home. Many viewers will feel heard: little more than two months have passed since Avengers: Endgame crushed it with three hours of intergalactic pain, not to mention last December’s superb animated Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Can’t Marvel give it a rest for a season? Well, no. Almost aware of how thirsty it is, the new movie – meta, irreverent and nowhere near a bad time – works best when it plays like a vacation from MCU seriousness. An unexpected blast of Whitney Houston’s 'I Will Always Love You' and a cheesy montage of fallen superheroes (it turns out to be a high-school AV club’s video tribute) brings us up to speed in a new post–Tony Stark world of people reckoning with the “Blip,” when half the world’s population disappeared and suddenly came back. Peter, meanwhile, a self-described “16-year-old kid from Queens,” hopes to reveal his true feelings to MJ (Zendaya, feisty while being quietly vulnerable, showing off big range between this and HBO’s Euphoria) while on a class trip in Europe. As Far from Home leans into this travelogue section, much of it shot on location (the exquisite gondolas and cozy back alleys of Venice require no CGI to be superheroic), you wish the film would remain a breezy teen comedy, one with a panicky best frien

There’s a lot that’s mind-bendingly corny about director Danny Boyle and writer Richard Curtis’s Yesterday, a peppy ‘what-if?’ musical comedy that imagines a world in which the Beatles never existed. Your ability to spend time in its big-hearted, dad-joke world might lie with your tolerance for Ed Sheeran making fun of himself: if you can cope with those sort of inventions along with the film’s hit-and-miss gag rate and its happy-clappy view of modern Britain, then its endless sugar rush of Beatles covers and endearing performances from the likes of Lily James and newcomer Himesh Patel make it hard not to like. It also has a strange cameo, bold and not what you expect, and maybe the best screen jokes so far about Google searches. (Type ‘John Paul George Ringo’ in a Beatles-less universe and what do you get? ‘Pope John Paul II’ of course.) It all spins on a goofy high concept that blossoms in an average corner of coastal Suffolk. Jack (Himesh Patel, a real discovery) is a struggling 27-year-old singer-songwriter sick of playing to thin crowds. But his bright-eyed old friend and manager Ellie (James) is supportive – and clearly in love with him. The years of musical irrelevance end when there’s an electricity blackout across the globe, a jolt from the storytelling gods so absurd that you go with it. Jack is knocked off his bicycle and wakes in hospital to the gradual realisation that not a single other soul in the world knows who the Beatles are. The most powerful moment in t

It’s rare for a movie to combine cinematic fireworks and social commentary in quite the thrilling and mischievous way that Korean director Bong Joon-ho manages with Parasite, a slick home-invasion drama that mirrors the masks worn by its characters: polite until they drop the pretence. The director of The Host and Snowpiercer is no stranger to genre gymnastics, and here he tells the story of a poor Seoul family infiltrating the lives of a super-rich household through suspense, drama, laughs and farce, allowing moments of pure terror, quiet observation and baroque noise to sit happily alongside each other. It never jars as it glides from one state of being to the next. The appeal of Parasite is simple and age-old: inequality, class, manners and how we behave to protect what’s ours – or to gain that which we believe should be ours. We meet a hard-up family living in a ‘semi-basement’ with a view of an alleyway where folk like to come and take a piss. The husband Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho), wife Chung-sook (Chang Hyae-jin) and their twentysomething kids, son Ki-woo (Choi Woo-sik) and daughter (Ki-jung) are all scraping together a living doing odd jobs like constructing pizza boxes. The film’s touchpaper is lit when Ki-woo fakes his CV and starts tutoring the daughter of a handsome rich young businessman Mr Park (Lee Sun-kyun) and his equally alluring and polished wife Yeon-kyo (Cho Yeo-jeong). One by one, the rest of the family play the same game and infiltrate the Park household –

When a massive hurricane hits her Florida hometown, Haley (Kaya Scodelario) ignores evacuation orders to search for her missing father (Barry Pepper). Finding him gravely injured in the crawl space of their family home, the two become trapped by quickly encroaching floodwaters. As time runs out to escape the strengthening storm, Haley and her father discover that the rising water level is the least of their fears.

ARMSTRONG is a dramatic and emotional documentary that features never-before-seen family home-movie footage, along with still and moving images that chronicle Neil Armstrong's incredible life. With the support of the Armstrong family, including his two sons Rick and Mark, the film details his near-death experiences as a fighter pilot in Korea, his test pilot days, the drama and excitement of the Gemini 8 and Apollo 11 missions, and the challenges that followed his extraordinary fame. The film will launch into theaters and on demand July 12th to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the first moon landings.

Based on the international bestseller, the riveting first film in the Department Q series introduces maverick detective Carl Mørck who, after majorly botching an assignment, is relegated to reviewing cold cases. With his new partner , the moody Mørck begins digging into the unsolved disappearance of a high-ranking female politician who supposedly committed suicide but whose body was never recovered-a mystery that plunges the investigators into a dark and disturbing conspiracy. A nonstop series of ingenious twists and shocking surprises keep the suspense simmering in this stylish thriller.

First, the good news: Dark Phoenix is a fairly watchable addition to a franchise that has felt stretched to breaking point. It boasts visual sass, the set-pieces are mostly fun and the acting stands up as well as you’d expect with a charismatic cast well-grooved in the X-universe. In Sophie Turner’s Jean Grey and Jennifer Lawrence’s Raven, it has two nuanced female characters front and centre – three, if you count Jessica Chastain’s ethereal alien-type creature – something that still can’t be said for too many superhero movies. It’s not nearly as good as Logan or X2, but it’s a whole lot better than the eyeball-poking affliction that was X-Men: Apocalypse. On the flipside, it still feels like a fairly pointless retread of Chris Claremont and John Byrne’s The Dark Phoenix Saga, which we’ve already seen (and hated) in Brett Ratner’s 2006 disaster X-Men: The Last Stand. It bolts on a pallid alien invasion storyline that’s more X-Files than X-Men and is laden with lumpen dialogue about destiny and "controlling your inner power" that could have been lifted wholesale from a tai chi manual. Throw in a long delay in the release date and there’s the inescapable feeling of a franchise half-heartedly winding down before the inevitable reboot kicks in, with Disney (and the might of Marvel Studios) replacing 20th Century Fox at the wheel and meshing the mutants into its superhero pantheon. Dark Phoenix introduces the serving X-Men as a kind of global 000 service, leaping into the X-Jet

Taking the old-fashioned highs of an MGM musical and pairing them with the deep lows of an addiction drama, Rocketman is a turbo-charged rock fantasia that pushes hard against the boundaries of the medium as it zips through the first four decades of Elton John’s life. The songs explode from the screen, time jumps catapult the story forward with exhilarating élan and even the emotional stuff lands, for the most part. Sure, Elton John purists will be here until Christmas pointing out the flaws in the chronology and the liberties taken with real-life events, but they’ll be doing it dancing in the aisles. It’s a credit to director Dexter Fletcher, who really comes of age as a filmmaker here, that any thoughts of Bohemian Rhapsody fade away in the first few minutes. Fletcher was parachuted in to help finish that Queen biopic, but while there are some superficial parallels, he’s saved all his good stuff for Rocketman. From an opening blast of 'The Bitch Is Back' which thrusts a young Reggie Dwight (Matthew Illesley) into a glorious, sepia-tinged dance routine outside his northwest London home, the movie is filled with vividly choreographed, imaginatively staged, wow-isn’t-cinema-great? moments. One standout sequence finds a drunk and overdosing Elton plunging suicidally into his Los Angeles pool, before segueing from ambulance to hospital to concert stage, via a boyhood version of himself playing the title track on a tiny piano — underwater. It must have looked nuts on the script

Twenty-seven years after the release of the animated classic, Aladdin gets the live-action treatment, with Sherlock Holmes director Guy Ritchie at the helm. The well-known plot is the stuff of Disney magic: a rags-to-riches tale in which a common thief wins the heart of a princess with the help of a magic lamp that transforms him into a prince. If today's Aladdin is not quite a scene-for-scene remake, it’s pretty close. The plot is tweaked with some sensible improvements: Agrabah, a mythical Silk Road city, was described in the original opening song as “barbaric”. It’s now simply chaotic, with a bustling population of people from as far as northern Europe (look out for Billy Magnussen’s hilarious Prince Anders) to China, and everywhere in between. It’s clear that this version of Aladdin celebrates the cultures from which the Arabian Nights folk tale emerged – a sensitivity no doubt learned (better late than never) from Black Panther, which provided an alternative to the typical white-saviour motif. Canadian-Egyptian actor Mena Massoud perfectly captures Aladdin’s street-smart charm, while British-Gujarati actress Naomi Scott gives a firecracker performance as Princess Jasmine, showing she’s less concerned with finding a husband than learning the required skills to succeed her father (Navid Negahban) to the throne. Marwan Kenzari’s Jafar verges on pantomine villainy, but there’s no denying that he cuts a menacing figure. Best of all, the film is a proudly out-and-out musica

Nobody wanted this one: a reboot of a series that now feels more redundant with every galaxy-guarding wisecrack coming from the theater next door. But how fun was it back in 1997, when CGI-heavy sci-fi first collided with salt-and-pepper buddy comedy? After three films, Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones are now AWOL – probably wisely on their part – leaving the dark suits and memory-wiping neuralysers to Tessa Thompson and Chris Hemsworth, who may bring to mind their superior Thor: Ragnarok (which you probably saw and swiftly forgot about some lazy afternoon). They have little to do in a film that’s both whirlingly busy and stubbornly listless and uninspired. It won’t exactly make you hate movies, full stop, but Men in Black: International imposes such a generic dullness, it will have you seriously examining your entertainment choices. For a character that’s meant to be born and raised in Brooklyn, Thompson’s Molly, an often naïve trainee agent, represents a missed opportunity for toughness – or at least the endearing street smarts that this series used to supply on the regular. Meanwhile, if you ever wondered when Hemsworth’s surfer-bro charm would curdle into swagger, it’s now: as Molly’s new partner, Agent K, Hemsworth is almost shockingly unfunny. When, only 15 minutes in, you’re hearing boss Emma Thompson complain about their secret organisation’s gendered name (“I’ve had the conversation,” she fumes), you have no idea you’re experiencing the film’s only funny line. She di

Not to be excessively literal about that title, but when a movie – even one about Hitler Youth – is as saturated with visual gorgeousness as Never Look Away (the Oscar-nominated cinematography is by The Natural’s Caleb Deschanel), you can’t look away. That’s not exactly meant as an endorsement. German director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, maker of the slick 2006 spy drama The Lives of Others, loves seizing upon provocative ideas, and he’s not afraid to flaunt a little showmanship – or a lot of it. That means beautiful actors, hot sex scenes and, it must be said, a nagging sense of vacancy. Never Look Away comes from the biographical details of the photorealistic painter Gerhard Richter, specifically during his maturing years in various art schools in East and West Germany. (These institutions are presented a touch comically, as places for poseurs.) Playing the film’s hero, Kurt, actor Tom Schilling has the magnetism of a young truth searcher: he’s angular, he broods and he looks like a piece of sculpture himself. In a larger sense, the film is about the postwar generation of Germans desperate for a new direction, and when Henckel von Donnersmarck focuses on the artmaking, especially Richter’s hypnotic blurring technique, it’s powerful – a persuasive statement about the transformative power of representation. There’s politics and confrontation in Kurt’s work, and the film helps you understand that. Too often, though, Never Look Away plays like overheated melodrama, espe

If you’re not familiar with Paraguayan cinema, that’s hardly surprising: the South American country produced a handful of films during the entire 20th century. But it only takes a single filmmaker – a Bergman, von Trier or Haneke – to put a country on the map. On the evidence of The Heiresses, director Marcelo Martinessi might be the one to do it. It took out the Sydney Film Prize at the Sydney Film Festival in 2018, and scores bonus points for being the most Bechdel test-friendly film of the year. Middle-aged couple Chela (Ava Brun) and Chiquita (Margarita Irún) have enjoyed being part of Paraguay’s wealthy elite, but straitened times mean big changes are on the way. Mounting debts lead to a spell in prison for Chiquita, treasured possessions are being sold off, and Chela resorts to running a taxi service for well-to-do women. Humiliation would appear to be all that their future holds, but venturing from her rusting gilded cage leads Chela to enjoy new freedoms, including sensual bisexual Angy (Ava Ivanova), and a future ripe with possibility. Working from his own exquisitely observed script, and interpreted by phenomenal actors with barely any screen experience, Martinessi creates a beguiling, female-centric story that has an almost Almodóvar-esque understanding of women. It’s directed with a documentarian’s sense of realism, cleverly anchored to Chela as the film’s viewpoint. It’s an assured feature debut and it isn’t too much of a stretch to see Chela’s late flowering a

In this third installment of the adrenaline-fueled action franchise, super-assassin John Wick (Reeves) returns with a $14 million price tag on his head and an army of bounty-hunting killers on his trail. After killing a member of the shadowy international assassin's guild, the High Table, John Wick is excommunicado, but the world's most ruthless hit men and women await his every turn.

The Tolkien estate has pre-emptively ‘disavowed’ this biopic of fantasy great JRR Tolkien – a fancy way of letting the world know that it was made without any official help and basically boo-sucks to the filmmakers. There’ll be few regrets when its trustees see the finished film. Despite the best efforts of its committed young cast, and especially a game (if suspiciously old-looking) Nicholas Hoult as Tolkien in his late teens and early twenties, it’s a plodding and polite portrayal that holds few surprises. Don’t come for the orcs and elves, either: Tolkien is set long before The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit were published, with director Dome Karukoski flashing back from trenches of World War I, where Tolkien served, to his Tom Brown-ish school days and a chequered university career that almost ended in ignominy. Instead, he peppers the film with abrupt cutaways to imaginary CGI battles and mythological beasties to foreshadow the tales that will one day make him. None are a fraction as thrilling as the opening moments of Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Ring. Tolkien is as much an origin story for his storytelling skills and genius for inventing languages as a biopic, but this literary foreshadowing is an overplayed motif. From identifying Tolkien’s three hobbit-like school chums as the blueprints for Frodo, Bilbo and co, to linking the horrors of the Great War with the Dead Marshes, Mordor and Middle Earth’s other dark corners, the beats land with the subtlety of

If you’re a filmmaker who isn’t Armando Iannucci, maybe sit the next election cycle out on the evidence of this toothless, if diverting, political comedy. Its set-up already feels a bit passé: Bob Odenkirk plays a dim US President whose only qualification for the job is having portrayed one on TV (a credential that actually makes him more qualified than the current POTUS). Intending to resign and make the ‘more prestigious’ shift to movies, he endorses Charlotte Field (Charlize Theron), his workaholic Secretary of State, whose marketing firm ranks her attributes like a Dungeon & Dragons character sheet, giving her low marks for ‘humour’. How will this Hillary-esque candidate crack the glass ceiling? By employing the speechwriting skills of Fred Flarsky (Seth Rogen), an unemployed journalist she used to babysit. Ostensibly verbal and cutting, Long Shot actually works best during its bits of physical comedy. Theron continues to prove herself a genius of ungainly moments: her podium wave has an unnatural elbow wobble that makes Elaine's dancing on Seinfeld seem smooth. And Rogen gets more mileage out of a turquoise windbreaker than you’d think possible. The central joke, briskly directed by Jonathan Levine (Warm Bodies), is that these two oddballs could somehow fall in love. It’s a gag that’s somehow insulting to both Theron and Rogen. But when Long Shot has Charlotte dropping MDMA and spacing out in an impromptu war room, it has just the right amount of irreverence. The perfo

Arriving with the sledgehammer momentum that only 21 previous global blockbusters can provide, Avengers: Endgame is the multiplex-rattling and curiously emotional culmination of the Marvel Cinematic Universe – at least until the next chapter. You know it’s going to be long (three hours, but there’s no need to sit out the end credits this time); you know it’s going to be high-level homework for even the most advanced fan. But what you don’t know is how deeply invested you may be in these 11 years of movies, a compendium of destruction and heroism that altered our culture but also reflected it, sometimes weightlessly, at other times grandly. Endgame often pays tribute to itself, which makes it as fascinating as it is self-serious. It taps into a live wire of epic, doomy tragedy and phoenix-like rebirth that comics do so well. Working from an intricate screenplay by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely that sometimes finds calm in the storm, the film begins (after a brief cold open for all you Hawkeye fans) just as the whole MCU did: with Robert Downey Jr’s neurotic Tony Stark grappling with his responsibilities. Downey is the actor upon which the franchise was launched, in 2008’s whiz-bang Iron Man, and there’s a symmetry to giving him the floor during Endgame’s downbeat early stretch – when it's an operatic grief drama in which half the world’s living creatures have blown away in clouds of dust. Cities are now ghost towns, dating is apparently a d

Long, densely scripted and full of thunderous passions, Mike Leigh’s urgent grassroots epic about an infamous 1819 massacre of peaceful Manchester protestors by cavalry is a whole lot of movie. It’s meticulously crafted, every scene drawing you in with precise period detail and full-bore performances from its ensemble cast, and it powers through great slabs of British social history, finding contemporary relevance every step of the way. The iniquity of the Corn Laws, the struggle for the vote and the birth of England’s Reformist movement are all covered en route to the violent climax we know is coming. The authenticity is immersive, even if the historical exposition occasionally feels like prep for an exam no one’s warned you about. It opens with shell-shocked young bugler Joseph (newcomer David Moorst), on the shattered battlefield of Waterloo in 1815, before swiftly introducing a country where the spoils of war are shared equally between the rich and the very rich. As the Tory Prime Minister hands £250,000 to the victor of Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington, the traumatized ex-soldier returns home to Manchester to find his mother (Maxine Peake, terrific) barely able to afford bread. The tariff-fixing Corn Laws are keeping prices inflated, stiffing the city’s textile workers as farmers and landlords continue to ratchet up the profits. You don’t need to be a grassroots activist to feel the modern-day resonances. Laudably, Leigh ignores the “great man” theory of history to det