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| The Guardian - Culture: Film | | | | Nitram review – deeply disturbing drama about mass killer Martin Bryant | | by Peter Bradshaw Jul 1, 2022 | | Director Justin Kurzel shies away from depicting the Port Arthur massacre itself but outstanding performances mean it’s still a highly unsettling story Australian director Justin Kurzel has made his most purely disturbing film since his debut Snowtown in 2011. Like that film, Nitram is based on a real-life case of murder and family dysfunction (which incidentally also applies to Kurzel’s version of Macbeth). And he has four outstanding performances from Judy Davis, Essie Davis, Anthony LaPaglia and Caleb Landry Jones. The Port Arthur massacre in 1996 was perpetrated by a violently disturbed young man, Martin Bryant, who shot and killed 35 people at a Tasmanian tourist site with a semi-automatic rifle bought legally; he was apparently inspired by the UK’s Dunblane massacre one month earlier. The Australian government took immediate steps to limit the sales of weaponry. Kurzel and screenwriter Shaun Grant have dramatised Bryant’s own deeply disturbed home and family environment and the utterly bizarre twists that his life had taken in the time leading up to the shooting. His pre-murder existence has a stranger-than-fiction quality that would be worthy of feature film treatment, even if the killings had never happened. Continue reading... | | | | | Thinking the unthinkable: is Hollywood really going to make a sequel to ET? | | by Ben Child Jul 1, 2022 | | Comments this week from Henry Thomas, who played Elliott in the 1982 hit, indicated that ET, wherever he is, just might be getting a call … Lord of the Rings is unfilmable; nobody will ever better Sean Connery in the role of James Bond; Top Gun will never get a sequel … a lot of unshakable Hollywood totems of received thinking have been rudely toppled by the march of time. Could ET be next on the list of movies that you never expected would get a sequel but does? It’s still unlikely, honestly. But you know the money men in Hollywood have got one eye on Top Gun: Maverick’s current $1bn global box office gross. Given the original Top Gun, in 1986, managed less than half the greenbacks pulled in by Steven Spielberg’s junior sci-fi bromance in 1982, one can only imagine that a well put together followup might even challenge for the highest-grossing movie of all time mantle (currently held by Avatar with a staggering $2.847m). Continue reading... | | | | | |
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