Force of Nature: The Dry 2 (2024)

The Dry 2 squanders the two things the original The Dry had going for it: its strong evocation of small-town Australia - so real - and Eric Bana's likeable Falk, tied to that place through his past but now a fish-out-of-water city slicker - but here, the setting is a fictional rainforest (the Dandenong, Yarra, and Otway Ranges standing in for the - for some reason fictional - Giraling Ranges) and Falk has been reduced to a generic interrogator of one suspect after another - and in a particularly uninteresting mystery - the disappearance of a woman from the world's dreariest company retreat where five or six women snap at each other about too many plot points all out of scope of their miserable forest prison: peripheral corporate skullduggery, references to bullying, allusions to the wayward pasts of two young sisters, ultimately unnecessary harkbacks to a serial killer case, and Falk's unilluminating backstory - a feeble attempt at grounding him once more in place through his mother's weird disappearance years and years earlier. 

 

★★☆☆☆

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Elvis (2022)

It garnered the lead, Austin Butler, BAFTA and Golden Globe awards but he never has a chance to act given the relentless strobe of Baz Luhrmann's three-hour docudrama: the camera flicks, spins, and sweeps, never resting for a second on anything - Butler included - and we unnecessarily spin and enter Graceland upside-down several times, so, while interesting, this is an exhausting look at Elvis's life, his upbringing, dizzying rise to stardom, financial exploitation, and premature death. 

★★★☆☆

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Moulin Rouge (2001)

After Strictly Ballroom and Romeo and Juliet, Baz Luhrmann's next big breakout success was this showy "jukebox musical", a carry-on set in Paris featuring a forlorn playwright, a pompous Duke financing his play, and the leading lady they both love, and for all its showiness, boisterousness, fandango, and hot air, it is about nothing much at all and suffers dreadfully from the casting of a partucularly low-aspect Nicole Kidman as the focus of so much passion.

★★☆☆☆

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M:i-2 (2010)

Tom Cruise is the best thing in this, the worst of the five Mission: Impossible movies so far and one that plays like an Australian tourism advertisement marketed to an Asian movie-going audience, with pointed Australian accents and Aussie tourism icons placed throughout and with direction by John Woo despite his balletic "heroic bloodshed" style not being suited to the spy series.

★☆☆☆☆

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