The idea of the prodigal son returning home after an extended absence has been done a lot in movies. Because it’s so thematically rich though, unlike other plot cliché’s, it’s also been done well, memorably in movies like The Indian Runner, You Can Count on Me, No Looking Back and in Australia’s own (extremely worthy, early Russell Crowe vehicle) The Crossing.

Intelligent crafted, thoughtful and well-made, The Company You Keep is exactly the type of engrossing and lively thriller that we so rarely get to see coming out of America now.

Crude, excessively long and just plain misconceived, The Loneliest Planet is not only the perfect case study of how not to make world cinema, it’s also a perseverance test for audiences looking for punishment.

The French auteur Francois Ozon has crafted a deftly intelligent character drama interwoven with a psychological thriller that works extremely well in the first two thirds before collapsing under the weight of expectation in its finale.

Showing as part of the section of “Women’s Stories” this year in the French Film Festival is On Air, a character driven drama that follows an emotionally damaged women’s search for closure with the mother who gave her up to an orphanage as a child.

What’s a French film festival without an unabashedly full-blown, over the top romance? Serving that purpose this year is Happiness Never Comes Alone, a movie that is to cinema what a ridiculously large lollipop is to confectionary: it starts off with a pleasant enough sweetness, but goes on way too long and by the end, it just hurts your teeth.

Finally getting a theatrical release in Australia (strangely after the release of the two films Woody Allen made after it; Midnight In Paris and To Rome With Love), You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger feels like a stylistic companion piece to his earlier, and much more successful, European piece, Vicky Cristina Barcelona. The film uses the same casual, matter-of-fact [...]

Adapted from the popular series of novels by Lee Childs, Jack Reacher is a big budget, franchise baiting attempt to create a darker, edgier hero for a modern (perhaps more cynical) cinema audience that ultimately falls short of the mark.

There’s a scene halfway through Vicky Cristina Barcelona where the narrator elaborates on the thoughts of the American Christina while spending time in Barcelona: “She was already thinking of herself as a kind of ex-patriot, not smothered by what she believed to be America’s puritanical and materialistic culture which she had little patience for. She saw herself more a European [...]

After spending over half a century in development hell (it was originally conceived as vehicle for Marlon Brando at the height of his post Wild One fame), the adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s classic novel has finally made it to the screen, and the results are mixed bag, partly brilliant, partly eccentric and partly pretentious.