Alex Casey

Look, I’m all for an unlikely friendship story. A budgie and a lion cub? Sign me up. The Hound and Arya Stark? Absolutely love it. A reigning ancient monarch who forces a young Indian servant to hang out with her all the time because she’s a bit bored? Hmm, sounds troubling. Even if loosely based […]

On my way to the cinema, a man stopped and yelled across the Britomart escalators that I should “lighten up, princess”. I bring this up because, as humiliating as those experiences are, it was a depressingly fitting hors d’oeuvre for the sloppy pub meal of sexism that Hotel Coolgardie would later serve up. Brave Finnish […]

Turns out Amélie grew up, got glasses and now works behind a grocer’s desk – kind of. French comedy from first-time director Julien Rappeneau Rosalie Blum follows a similar cutesy-stalker narrative without half as much whimsy. Vincent (Kyan Khojandi) is a balding barber, who still lives with his eccentric, puppet-wielding mother. In an ever-distant long […]

Tom Cruise got hit by a bus, he fell out of a plane, he kissed an evil Mummy, which is kind of the same. The Mummy reboot is the first opening creak of the casket that is the Universal Dark Universe (bad name, cool idea), and it’s a popcorn blockbuster with an emphasis on the […]

First: some lassos of truth. Sure, there are less clunky ways to demonstrate Diana’s pure lion heart without having her yell about believing in love about 30,000 times. Sure, the villainous Ares looks like someone melted an Sauron Sevens costume over an upright goat. Sure, the big CGI battle scenes can look hokey – especially […]

Taking us inside the legacy of New Zealand poultry pageantry, Pecking Order shows us people, and chookhouses, you’d never otherwise see on screen. This is a world of faded Canterbury rugby shorts, missing teeth and free promotional Farmlands caps, and it’s bloody charming one indeed. The chicken enthusiast subjects span broadly, from young mulleted Rhys […]

If La La Land is America’s sparkly love letter to the golden age of 1950s Hollywood, then Their Finest is Britain’s stiff-upper-lip pat on the back to those who kept calm and carried on making art in the dull fog of WWII. Gemma Arterton plays the everyday heroine Catrin Cole, hired by the Ministry of […]

Beauty in the Beast is a tale as old as time. You know, the one where a successful Disney film of the 2D animation era gets dusted off and all dressed up in CGI and celebrities and plays out to a predictable end. It looks exciting and new, and there are a few winky nods to […]

Fifty Shades Darker made it abundantly clear that there’s nothing a chick loves more than a ball, be it a masquerade event or two small silver ones to stick where the sun don’t shine. Even if your boyfriend is a controlling billionaire sadist who orders your meals, chooses your dresses and BUYS THE COMPANY YOU […]

The story of Lion sounds like unfathomably cliché weep-bait, and it absolutely would be if the events had not been 100% true. After a savage twist of fate, a little boy named Saroo finds himself stranded 1700km from his hometown in India. So begins a tremendous return journey that spans decades and oceans alike, as Saroo attempts […]

Look, if there’s one thing that can bring holiday cheer this festive season it’s a housewife pig fulfilling her dreams of singing Taylor Swift under the dazzling lights of whatever the animal equivalent of Broadway is. At least that’s what Minions-masters Illumination Entertainment’s Sing is banking on, taking the delightful animal world of Zootopia, stripping […]

Directed by Robert Zemeckis (Forrest Gump, Flight), Allied is a cinematic Turducken of sorts. Take a weepy romance, insert into spy intrigue, wrap that in epic WW2 drama, and then chuck into stunning 1940s couture. The story begins in Casablanca, where Canadian spy Max Vatan (Brad Pitt) falls in love with French resistance member Marianne […]

The Oscars have crept up on us again and I have finally managed to see (nearly) all of the front runners this year. As I chowed down more choctops than Charlize Theron prepping for Monster, I made it my civic duty to keep tabs on what the female characters in each film were doing. This […]

For several years I have called myself a projectionist but I don’t really know if I can anymore. Like everything in the entire world, the cinema that I work at has made the digital switchover from 35mm projection, and my very cool and interesting skillset has been rendered redundant quite literally with the flick of […]

A while back, I went to see Funny Face in the NZIFF Autumn Season at the Civic, wherein notoriously uggo Audrey Hepburn gets a wildly unnecessary makeover. It got me thinking a lot about different makeover sequences, and how they reveal a scarily similar message for women: you must be better and you must do […]

I am returning to University this year, and with most things in life, I turn to films for a refresher course in what it all means to be a studious-yet-fun-loving-party-liaison. I was quickly reminded, however, that movies seldom match the reality of the University or “college” experience. So, in order to promptly quash any “freshman” […]

Winner of Best Original Screenplay at this year’s Academy Awards, Spike Jonze’s Her is a winningly unique ROM-com boasting achingly human joy and melancholy, as Steve so eloquently put it in his five star review. But for a movie about a man who, essentially, buys and falls in love with an ‘artificial’ female companion, it’s […]

This blog started, as most great modern works do, with Rachel McAdams. I saw her a few weeks ago in About Time, her latest foray into the world of time travel. Or, should I say, the peripherals of time travel – wherein she is forced to stick to the boring linear world whilst her various […]

As a massive fan of Halloween as both the event of the year and a horror franchise, I thought I would take the liberty of revisiting one of the most important horror franchises in the game, and breaking down some potential costume ideas. Warning: these may rock the core of the Halloween costume community forever. […]