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Jan 8, 2025 | 
sbs.com.au | Travis Johnson
There's a moment early on in the Finnish/Swedish co-production Codename: Annika where our protagonist, undercover cop Emma Haka (Sannah Nedergård) is watching the subject of her current investigation, shady art dealer Rasmus Ståhlgren (Ardalan Esmaili) practice holding his breath in a water tank. He stays under for five and a half minutes, while she tells him she could probably only last for one. He says for most people, the breaking point is four, but the calmer you are, the longer you'll last.
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Nov 14, 2024 | 
flicks.co.uk | Luke Buckmaster |Travis Johnson |Steve Newall |Liam Maguren
Clarisse Loughrey’s Show of the Week column, published every Friday, spotlights a new show to watch or skip. This week: A 1970s espionage thriller gets a fresh redo in The Day of the Jackal. Line up the shot. Check wind speed. Calculate distance. Anticipate movement. Sky’s new spy series, a (loose) adaptation of Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 novel The Day of the Jackal, takes pleasure in the details.
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Oct 13, 2024 | 
flicks.co.uk | Clarisse Loughrey |Luke Buckmaster |Steve Newall |Travis Johnson
Clarisse Loughrey’s Show of the Week column, published every Friday, spotlights a new show to watch or skip. This week: The lines between the bully and the bullied get blurry in Sweetpea. Rhiannon (Ella Purnell) has a long list of people she’d like to kill: manspreaders, chauvinistic bosses, co-workers with no spatial awareness, sexual partners who only reply in emojis. It’s scarily easy in the modern world for someone’s default emotion to be murderous rage.
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Sep 30, 2024 | 
sbs.com.au | Travis Johnson
It’s easy to confuse legendary actor Jeff Bridges with his most well-known on-screen alter ego, Jeffrey ‘The Dude’ Lebowski; his amiable public persona certainly maps onto the Coen brothers’ iconic slacker closely enough. Lebowski fans might be shocked by the first episode of The Old Man, which wastes little time in showing us a grizzled Bridges calmy dispatching a helpless man with two quick bullets to the chest.
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Sep 24, 2024 | 
sbs.com.au | Travis Johnson
We know that the world as we know it is going to go someday, hopefully long after you and I have predeceased it. All else being equal, the Earth will be engulfed by the sun some five billion years down the track, when our star is in its red giant phase, although it’s possible nobody is going to be around to bear witness to that. But we’re compelled to wonder what it might be like to personally experience the apocalypse.
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Aug 16, 2024 | 
flicks.co.uk | Clarisse Loughrey |Travis Johnson |Luke Buckmaster |Liam Maguren
Alien: Romulus sees fresh young prey encounter the iconic Alien, drawing on familiar elements from the franchise. “That was the intention,” director Fede Álvarez tells Rory Doherty: “I was trying to bring them all together in one movie.”It is 9:30am the day before the release of Alien: Romulus, the biggest film of Fede Álvarez’s career thus far, and he is talking about Pulp Fiction. More accurately, he’s citing it as an example of something that was retro and visionary at the same time.
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Jul 2, 2024 | 
sbs.com.au | Travis Johnson
The heist is a well-worn plot structure for a reason – everybody loves a heist. The high stakes, the dizzying scores, the meticulous planning, the almost inevitable moment when the wheels come off – it’s enthralling stuff. Stanley Kubrick knew it when he made The Killing, Peter Collinson knew when he made The Italian Job (skip the remake), and Steven Soderbergh knew it when he made Ocean’s Eleven (in this case, skip the original).
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Jun 21, 2024 | 
sbs.com.au | Travis Johnson
There’s an exchange in Shoresy’s first season episode, “Know Your Role”, where soft spoken, freshly-minted ice hockey coach Sanguinet (Harlan Blayne Kytwayhat) tries to convince foul-mouthed, knuckle-dragging veteran player Shoresy (creator Jared Keeso) to not blast his teammates so brutally. Shoresy is nonplussed. “You're my teammate. You're my brother. I'd go to the wall for you. Would you go to the wall for me?”“I'll go to the wall,” Sanguinet allows.
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Apr 1, 2024 | 
sbs.com.au | Travis Johnson
We are apparently only getting one more movie out of Quentin Tarantino. The video store clerk turned filmmaker has long averred that directors start to fall off as they age, and decreed that he would call it quits after making 10 films. With both Kill Bill volumes counting as one movie, the big-chinned wunderkind’s next film, The Critic, is supposed to be his last (and are we still allowed to call him a wunderkind when he just turned 61?).
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Mar 27, 2024 | 
sbs.com.au | Travis Johnson
“I would say Lisa is hardworking and driven, she’s not fearless but is definitely someone who feels the fear and pushes through it,” India Mullen says thoughtfully. “She’s compassionate, but steely in her approach to doing what’s right, and she takes no prisoners.”She’s describing her character in The Vanishing Triangle, a new six-part Irish crime drama now on SBS on Demand.
