Andrew Nette

The Lighthouse (A24)

ABR Arts • 06 February 2020

It has been fascinating to watch the evolution of Robert Pattinson since the role that brought him to public attention, that of the reluctant vampire Edward Cullen, in the first instalment of the syrupy teen romance franchise Twilight (2008). In a little over a decade, he has transmogrified, via a series of eclectic, often challenging roles, into a major Hollywood talent, able to hold his own with ... (read more)

Danger Close: The Battle of Long Tan

ABR Arts • 02 August 2019

Australia has not made many war films, let alone films about the conflict in Vietnam. Not counting The Sapphires (2012), the story of the all-female Aboriginal band of the same name, which includes the women touring Vietnam to entertain American troops, our cinematic output about this war is precisely two films: The Odd Angry Shot (1979) and the little-known A Street to Die (1985), a drama ab ... (read more)

Suspiria

ABR Arts • 05 November 2018

There is a sense of tension and anticipation around any film remake, especially when the original is well known and received. So is the case with Luca Guadagnino’s version of his countryman, Dario Argento’s cult horror, Suspiria (1977). There has been intense on-line debate about the movie from the moment the first poster for the remake hit social media earlier this year. Speculation has incre ... (read more)

Wonderland (ACMI)

ABR Arts • 07 May 2018

I had never pondered the influence of Lewis Carroll’s stories, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871). This left me completely unprepared for Wonderland, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image’s latest Melbourne Winter Masterpieces exhibition. The enormous influence of young Alice and her strange world of bizarre anthropom ... (read more)

Andrew Nette reviews 'Year of the Orphan' by Daniel Findlay

June-July 2017, no. 392 • 29 May 2017

Daniel Findlay’s début novel, Year of the Orphan, contains all the elements apparently necessary for a successful contemporary dystopian novel. It is also a complex, challenging read, which creates a believable and alarming post-apocalyptic future in the Australian outback five hundred years in the future. The key character and main narrator is a young female in peril (so favoured in recent dy ... (read more)

Jasper Jones

ABR Arts • 10 February 2017

There is something deeply satisfying about watching a classic cinematic trope done well. The film version of Jasper Jones, the best-selling Australian novel of the same name by Craig Silvey, is a uniquely Australian take on the coming of age film, done very well. In publicity material, director Rachel Perkins (Bran Nue Dae, 2009; Radiance, 1998) name-checks Rob Reiner’s Stand By Me (1986) – t ... (read more)

Goldstone

ABR Arts • 04 July 2016

A film sequel is always a risky venture, and thus it is with Goldstone, Ivan Sen's follow-up to his 2013 outback crime drama, Mystery Road. But it is just one risk the writer–director–cinematographer director takes with this film. Goldstone re-introduces us to the indigenous police detective Jay Swan (Aaron Pedersen). The three years since the violent events in Mystery Road have not been kind ... (read more)

Scorsese (Australian Centre for the Moving Image)

ABR Arts • 27 May 2016

Scorsese, currently showing at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne, is not exactly the exhibition that is advertised, and that is a very good thing. Martin Scorsese's career has stretched over half a century and involves nearly sixty films. Yet anyone who has seen advance press and publicity for Scorsese could be forgiven for thinking the focus is mainly on the early and more m ... (read more)

Andrew Nette reviews 'Fear Is the Rider' by Kenneth Cook

March 2016, no. 379 • 24 February 2016

There is something alluring about the publication of a lost or unknown literary manuscript. How will it fit into the author's body of work? Is it inferior to or better than the published work? Does it illuminate a hitherto unknown aspect of the author's thinking, or make you re-examine the known sequencing or themes? These questions were on my mind as I read Fear Is the Rider, a previously unpubli ... (read more)

Spectre

ABR Arts • 09 November 2015

It has been intriguing to watch the culture war surrounding the James Bond franchise. Slowly mobilising for a while now, the lead-up to the latest instalment, Spectre, the twenty-fourth Bond film, and the second directed by Sam Mendes, has seen it kick up a notch. Is the character a misogynist? Is he too violent? Maybe the next Bond should be black – a debate fuelled by internet outrage over a c ... (read more)