Things to do in Melbourne this week

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.

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

The German Film Festival 2019 is recognising the 30th anniversary of the reunification of Germany with a program of comedies, dramas, thrillers, docos and more. Opening the festival on a high is Balloon (Ballon), the true story of two families who constructed a hot air balloon in secret and used it to escape East Germany in 1979. The film stars David Kross (The Reader) and Freidrich Mücke. Three films co-presented by the German Embassy also commemorate the 30 years since the Wall fell. Adam and Evelyn (Adam und Evelyn) is a lighthearted look at a woman who wants to move to the West while her partner doesn’t understand the appeal. Gundermann is a memoir that documents the life of East German folk singer, activist, family man and spy Gerhard Gundermann. And Sealed Lips (Und Der Zukunft Zugewandt) stars Alexandra Maria Lara (Downfall, Control) as a German communist returning home following imprisonment in a labour camp in the Soviet Union. The Centrepiece Selection of the festival is The Captain (Der Hauptmann), a black-and-white war thriller from German-born Hollywood director Robert Schwentke (The Time Traveler’s Wife). Young private Willi Herold deserts his ranks in the final weeks of World War II, chances upon a Luftwaffe uniform, and uses it to gain and abuse power. Styx concerns a paramedic who takes a solo yacht trip from Germany to Ascension Island in the South Atlantic Sea, only to encounter a trawler that has desperate refugees on board. A documentary tackles one

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

Inspired by a short story by Haruki Murakami (which was itself inspired by a story by William Faulkner), it centers on Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in), a farmer’s son-turned-deliveryman who dreams of becoming a writer. One day in Seoul, he meets Hae-mi (Jeon Jong-seo), an impulsive girl he half-remembers from school. Soon she’s asking him to feed her cat while she travels to Africa; later that night, she's seducing him. So when she asks him to meet her at the airport upon her return, he’s put out to find her in the company of wealthy sophisticate Ben (The Walking Dead’s Steven Yeun), who immediately treats them to a meal. 

Pet Sematary is exactly the kind of horror movie that is ripe for remaking. The 1989 film version of Stephen King’s creepy novel is fairly well remembered, but it’s far from a classic, not even the cult kind. You can reinvent it without really annoying anyone. That’s exactly what the creative team on this movie have done. They’ve hacked up the narrative and resurrected it in a slightly different, weirder form.  The script keeps the same rough shape as King’s novel. Louis Creed (Jason Clarke), his wife Rachel (Amy Seimetz) and their young daughter and son move to a quiet Maine town in the hope of a simpler life than the one they had in Boston. Louis learns of a spooky burial ground behind his house, which he discovers has the power to raise the dead. First, he buries his dead cat, which comes back whiffy and mean, but soon grief drives him to test its powers on someone human. In the details, the writers have some mischievous fun, changing key elements to give the film its own surprises (avoid all the trailers if you want some major ones preserved). Directors Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer make the tone just a little cheesy, as the premise deserves, but not overripe. The scares are easy – sometimes literally a cat jumping from the shadows – but cleanly done. And thanks to intense performances from Clarke and Seimetz, there’s a deep vein on of human sadness running beneath the silliness. 

We all have a superhero inside us, it just takes a bit of magic to bring it out. In Billy Batson's (Angel) case, by shouting out one word SHAZAM! this streetwise 14-year-old foster kid can turn into the adult Super Hero Shazam (Levi), courtesy of an ancient wizard. Still a kid at heart inside a ripped, godlike body Shazam revels in this adult version of himself by doing what any teen would do with superpowers: have fun with them! Can he fly? Does he have X-ray vision? Can he shoot lightning out of his hands? Can he skip his social studies test? Shazam sets out to test the limits of his abilities with the joyful recklessness of a child. But he'll need to master these powers quickly in order to fight the deadly forces of evil controlled by Dr. Thaddeus Sivana.

Girls Trip's Regina Hall and Black-ish's Marsai Martin both star as Jordan Sanders - Hall as the take-no-prisoners tech mogul adult version of Jordan and Martin as the 13-year-old version of her who wakes up in her adult self's penthouse just before a do-or-die presentation. Insecure's Issa Rae plays Jordan's long-suffering assistant April, the only one in on the secret that her daily tormentor is now trapped in an awkward tween body just as everything is on the line. Little is an irreverent new comedy about the price of success, the power of sisterhood and having a second chance to grow up - and glow up - right.

Destroyer follows the moral and existential odyssey of LAPD detective Erin Bell who, as a young cop, was placed undercover with a gang in the California desert with tragic results. When the leader of that gang re-emerges many years later, she must work her way back through the remaining members and into her own history with them to finally reckon with the demons that destroyed her past.

Let’s tackle the baby elephant in the room first: how does Disney’s beloved Dumbo look in a live-action movie? Happily, the teeny pachyderm is a suitably heart-melting presence in Tim Burton’s relatively orthodox redo of the 1941 animation classic. All giant expressive eyes and beach-towel ears, he’s a computer-generated creation that exudes picture-book warmth. It’s only when flying that he seems a bit clunky. Then again, maybe that’s the point. He is, after all, the least aerodynamic character to fly in a movie since Brian Blessed wobbled through Flash Gordon.
 The fact that you know his story inside out presents a challenge that Transformers screenwriter Ehren Kruger tries to overcome by introducing swathes of new human characters. Danny DeVito plays pompous impresario Max Medici, whose travelling circus is going a bit Grapes of Wrath in the dust bowls of the Midwest. Money is short and his last hope is the magical baby elephant tended to by damaged WWI veteran Holt Farrier (an oddly forgettable Colin Farrell) and his two willing kids, Milly (Nico Parker) and Joe (Finley Hobbins). 
Both are grieving for their mom, providing an obvious connection with Dumbo when the baby elephant’s own mother is sold. In truth, Burton, that great lover of scrappy outsiders, struggles to mine much beyond ponderous sincerity from these sluggish early scenes. Even a cast of oddball circus regulars – strongman, mermaid, snake charmer – fails to fire the director's i

Film review by Joshua Rothkopf Los Angeles women have no better avatar than Julianne Moore – film after film, she turns her complexity into a gift to the city’s quiet and desperate. Moore is brittle and close to self-ruination in Todd Haynes’s majestically chilly Safe; zonked out on pills (and guilt) in Magnolia; a distracted lust object in Short Cuts. You really have to go back to Gena Rowlands’s immortal turn in 1974’s A Woman Under the Influence, spitting and fidgeting on her Hollywood lawn, to find someone as good. So it really should be a Marvel-level event that Gloria Bell sees Moore adding to her LA pantheon in a major way. Don’t let the movie’s deceptively banal title fool you—this is as complete and full-bodied a performance as you’re likely to see all year. Subtly, Moore etches in the details: Gloria has been divorced for 12 years. She seems fine with that, shooing away the neighbour’s cat that keeps slipping into her apartment when she’s working her blah insurance job. (Anyone who belts out Olivia Newton-John songs in her car would never think of herself as a cat lady.) Gloria loves to dance, and it’s at these disco nights, the silver foxes prowling, that Moore cuts loose with her most heartbreaking work, every song an emotional dip and a rebirth. Chilean director Sebastián Lelio, an Oscar winner for his trans-compassionate A Fantastic Woman, has been here before, quite literally: his homegrown 2013 film, Gloria, was a first run of this material, which he now r

“What I do is to read a story only once, and if I like the basic idea, I just forget all about the book and start to create cinema,” said Alfred Hitchcock, explaining his technique for adapting novels. Writer-director Barry Jenkins, it’s fair to say, has a different modus operandi: his adaptation of James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk is so faithful to the original 1974 novel, they’re practically joined at the hip. He channels all of Baldwin’s lyricism and righteous anger into a story of love and injustice that burns with a gentle flame that occasionally blazes into a white heat. The resulting film is beautifully crafted and, despite what Hitch might say, definitely cinematic. As with Moonlight, his Oscar-winning breakthrough, Jenkins moves seamlessly through time. When he introduces the central young couple – the newly pregnant Tish (newcomer KiKi Layne) and her beau, Fonny (Stephan James) – they’re living in Harlem and already deeply in love; then he gives us glimpses of their shared childhood before we move forward to a more uncertain future. The majority of the film takes place in an early ’70s in which Fonny has been flung into prison on trumped-up rape charges, thanks to a racist cop with a grudge. The plot, such as it is, has Tish’s formidable mother (the terrific Regina King) leading the fight to solve his legal quandary. If a great tenderness and a rare celebration of African-American family life fills the story’s heart, its eyes glimmer with fire. When Fonn

Where does the line fall between selfless assistance and obsession? That’s the question raised by this thorny drama. Maggie Gyllenhaal’s teacher, Lisa Spinelli, is a vaguely dissatisfied wife and mother who struggles in the poetry classes she takes with charismatic lecturer Simon (Gael García Bernal). But everything changes when she hears Jimmy (Parker Sevak), one of her pupils, reciting a poem he has written. She becomes convinced that he is a prodigy and believes she must nurture his talent, whatever it takes. 

Call this actors’ duet sentimental and simplistic at your own peril. Green Book may well move you, possibly to tears, at the thought of real social change and kindness (at a time when we need it badly). Something of a reverse Driving Miss Daisy, it charts a road trip into racism shared by two well-worn stereotypes, characters that, almost surprisingly, come from real life – a true tale that happened in 1962. Tony "Lip” Vallelonga (a pizza-chomping Viggo Mortensen) is a brutal NYC club bouncer prone to howyadoins. On the hunt for work, he gets an unlikely gig at the invitation of Don Shirley (cryptic Mahershala Ali, superb), a finicky black jazz pianist who requires a tough driver to escort him on a tour of the Deep South. Tony’s no bleeding heart, but for the right price, he’s willing to swallow his pride. The mouth, however, can’t be closed: Tony cuts loose with deliriously rude arias about Little Richard, fried chicken and the proper way to write a love letter, and both actors shade their roles with unexpected nuance and a generosity of spirit. They widen the already spacious Cadillac into a stage for some of the most relaxed banter of the year. If you recall the movies that Green Book’s director Peter Farrelly made with his brother Bobby (There’s Something About Mary, the Dumb and Dumber saga), you won’t be surprised by the crassness or the unexpected heart, both Farrelly trademarks. The new film creates a beautiful friction eased by conversation – somewhat calculated, ye

Five years and two spin-off movies later, writer-producers Phil Lord and Chris Miller return to Bricksburg for a bigger, louder and brasher second Lego installment. But while it maintains the same level of playfulness, it doesn’t quite capture the novelty or fizz of the original. At the end of The Lego Movie we learned that the characters’ adventures were a product of a boy named Finn’s imagination. Now, his sister is here to play and their rivalry has caused a downbeat change in Bricksburg. Everybrick hero Emmet (Chris Pratt) is still his glass-half-full self, while Lucy (Elizabeth Banks), his Master Builder girlfriend, has become more brooding as their town, now known as Apocalypseburg, takes a beating from Duplo invaders. When an alien kidnaps Lucy, Batman (Will Arnett) and pals, Emmet mounts a solo mission to rescue them. There are some hilarious new songs (look out for “Gotham City Guys”) and the jokes are more meta than ever, with Arnett’s Batman still invariably the funniest figure in the room. But the comedy feels like overcompensation for a story that gets more convoluted as it shifts back and forth between the human and Lego worlds. Still, if you’re willing to let the quantum mechanics slide, you’ll have a pretty awesome time.

Thinkers debate with passion in Mimi Leder’s intellectual On the Basis of Sex, a knowingly old-fashioned (but far from dated) biopic of the inimitable Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Written by the 85-year-old Ginsburg’s nephew Daniel Stiepleman with affection for his aunt’s lifelong work on behalf of women’s rights – as well as her decidedly ennobled marriage founded on pure equality – On the Basis of Sex (like the stirring documentary RBG) is both a welcome cinematic dissent from today’s disastrous politics and a reminder that words, paired with meaningful action, can change the world. A winning, inspirational crowd-pleaser à la Hidden Figures, Leder’s film follows the early accomplishments of the young Ginsburg (an assured Felicity Jones, convincingly slipping into the trailblazer’s shoes), beginning in 1956. That’s the year in which the bouncy, opinionated Ruth marches into male-dominated Harvard Law School – at a dinner party, the handful of female students are asked to justify their academic seats, ones that could have gone to “Harvard Men”. It’s also where her devoted, ever-supportive husband Marty (Armie Hammer, lovably pragmatic) studies. Through Marty’s unforeseen health crisis and Ruth’s unfairly deterred professional aspirations (excuse after sexist excuse, law firms refuse to hire her), the film patiently advances toward the ’70s, focusing on the couple’s family life and Ruth’s career as a professor, leading sizzling feminist discourse among razor-sh

Who knows what makes mountain climber Alex Honnold – the daredevil at the heart of the so-terrifying-you’ll-hyperventilate ‘Free Solo’ – risk his life thousands of feet up with no ropes or securing gear of any kind. Maybe it’s a quest for perfection, or a death wish, or a unique biological inability to feel fear, or a pursuit of the ‘goddamn warrior spirit’ (his own words). All of these possibilities are suggested during this mesmerising documentary, but you won’t be looking for an explanation. Just like the sheer rock face, El Capitan, that looms like a one-kilometre-tall dare, Honnold himself is a force of nature: shy, prone to solitude and, by his own admission, potentially on the autism spectrum. He studies the complex moves in his climbing journal and waits for the right moment to head out, and up. Already a gripping watch, ‘Free Solo’ becomes extra special when it widens out to accommodate the people hanging on to Honnold’s vertical trajectory. We see him transition living in a van practising pull-ups to settling down with a doting girlfriend. Sanni McCandless takes huge emotional risks in getting close to Alex, who might die because of a single misstep, but his evolution through their relationship is heart-meltingly romantic – and ominous. Will it destroy his concentration? Meanwhile, a crew of rappelling cameramen, led by co-director Jimmy Chin, wrestles with its own ethical questions. Are they enabling decisions that could result in a fatality, all for the sake of a

Film review by Joshua Rothkopf You lean forward while watching Us, the new horror film from Jordan Peele, since his last one, Get Out, rewarded that kind of attention. So, when his movie tells us early on that there are thousands of miles of tunnels under the United States with “no known purpose,” you squirrel that away in your brain, knowing it’ll be important later. When Peele shows us a TV commercial for that weirdly faceless 1986 publicity stunt Hands Across America – or when there are a bunch of bunnies in cages or an apocalyptic Bible quote on a sign – those details get stored away, too. But none of it quite adds up to the nightmare in your head. Us is too confidently made, too expert in its scene-to-scene command, to call it an example of sophomore slump. Still, after the film reveals itself to be the home-invasion thriller it is (and then the lesser Invasion of the Body Snatchers it becomes), you feel a slight letdown. Peele, as ever, blends comedy and screams like a champ – muscles he toned on TV’s radical Key & Peele – and his actors are terrific. After a brief mid-’80s prologue in which a lonely kid (Madison Curry) in a Michael Jackson T-shirt encounters something awful in a beachside carnival fun house, she becomes the grown-up Adelaide (a finely haunted Lupita Nyong’o), now with two children of her own and a dad-joke-dispensing husband (Winston Duke). For some reason, they’ve bought a summer house by that same beach, and it’s where Adelaide must return – unless

This wistful, heartfelt celebration of the friendship between comedy giants Stan Laurel (Steve Coogan) and Oliver Hardy (John C Reilly) contains plenty of cosy movie-biz nostalgia and some mishaps with hats. It’s a love song played in a minor key, and it leaves an unexpectedly lingering impression. It’s also suitable for grandmas, if you need an option. Scripted by Philomena’s Jeff Pope (working closely from a book by Laurel and Hardy historian AJ Marriot), the story charts the duo’s final years as they embark on a gruelling tour of British theaters while trying to get a new Robin Hood picture off the ground. It’s 1953, and the world has long since moved on from their brand of slapstick to new talents like Abbot and Costello. The crowds are thin and their prospects look thinner. Imagine This Is Spinal Tap with extra pratfalls. The two leads are terrific: Reilly defies a slightly iffy fat suit to give us an avuncular but creaky Hardy, bemused by his friend’s work ethic and obsessed with the finer things in life. Coogan, in particular, is a revelation as Laurel, dialling down the trademark head-scratching mannerisms and unpeeling layers of disappointment and melancholy as the funnyman grapples with their failing film project and past wounds. Both disappear entirely into their characters, nailing the pair’s comic routines in a way that quietly speaks to a thousand hours of practice. Stan & Ollie sprinkles in some of the pair’s classic lines (“I’m never getting married again,”