And you thought Oscar voters didn't watch enough films --check out the AACTA nominations!

by Travis C

THE KING

The nominations for the Australian Academy Cinema Television Arts (or AACTA) awards were released this week. Since they changed from being the Australian Film Institute awards (or AFI) several years ago, the Cinema nominations are drawing from a smaller and smaller subset of the large amount of entrants. This year was no exception with only nine feature films being nominated in all the categories (not counting the Indie category, but more on that later). It hasn't been the best 12 months for Aussie film but nevertheless…

Best Film

HOTEL MUMBAI

JUDY & PUNCH

THE KING

THE NIGHTINGALE

RIDE LIKE A GIRL

TOP END WEDDING...

Click to read more ...

Watch at Home: Beach bums, doppelgangers, euphoria, and giant little ones...

Nathaniel R giving you the heads up on what's available to you now to screen at home. It's a big weekend all told in terms of titles suddenly available

New on DVD/Blu-Ray/Rental
• Beach Bum -the latest from Harmony Korine. I hated it but Murtada kinda liked it as you probably heard on the podcast
• Giant Little Ones - underseen drama about the confusion of sexual fluidity in the coming-of-age years
• Hotel Mumbai - well reviewed terrorism drama starring Dev Patel and Armie Hammer
• Under the Silver Lake - David Robert Mitchell's bizarrely indulgent noir, equal parts tedious and memorable, his follow up to the incredible breakthrough It Follows
• Us - Jordan Peele's horror blockbuster with terrifically inventive performances from the whole cast.

iTunes deals and streaming roulette after the jump...

Click to read more ...

Review: Hotel Mumbai

by Jason Adams

What scares us -- the communal us -- shifts through time. The 70s gave us Vietnam allegories like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, while in the 80s Slasher Movies were all the rage as divorce numbers went up and women asserted their rights. Then there was so-called Torture Porn, which was all the rage while Bush & Cheney were throwing their waterboarding parties. So what now? It's hard not to see Grief as the theme of our current moment -- the great horror films of our age, films like The Babadook and Hereditary, are profound ruminations on a world that's already slipped through our fingers -- a madness so close its breath is hot on your throat, and a knowledge that its our own failures, our own shortcomings, that brought this all down upon us.

Hotel Mumbai is technically not a horror movie (look to Jordan Peele's Us, which Chris just reviewed, for this weekend's official entry in that genre) but it sure operates like one...

Click to read more ...