Based ever so loosely on an actual event when drug runners lost a load of the white powder in the hills of Tennessee. This ultimately led to the overdose death of a 79-kilogram American Black Bear after it ingested copious amounts of the drug. In a scenario that could only happen in America, the deceased bear was then stuffed and now resides in a shopping mall in Kentucky.

Director Elizabeth Banks’ has a sure hand on the tiller and uses her extensive knowledge of the comedy realm to entertain with lots of laughs and more than a subtle amount of gore. It’s all crowd-pleasing stuff. She also leaves no Southern stereotype stone unturned and fills the screen with loveable losers and unheralded heroes.

Make no mistake, if you are rooting for the human beings in this picture, you’ve aligned yourself with the losing side. The mighty Cocaine Bear will prevail. If the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences ever gets it together to give an Oscar for the best digital on-screen animal, the bear with the white nose should be a shoo-in.
Rob Hudson
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Cocaine Bear stars Keri Russell (The Americans), Emmy winner Margo Martindale (The Americans), Emmy winner Ray Liotta (The Many Saints of Newark), Alden Ehrenreich (Solo: A Star Wars Story), O’Shea Jackson Jr. (Straight Outta Compton), Jesse Tyler Ferguson (Modern Family), Kristofer Hivju (Game of Thrones), Kahyun Kim (American Gods), Christian Convery (Sweet Tooth), Brooklynn Prince (The Florida Project) and newcomer Scott Seiss.

Directed by Elizabeth Banks (Charlie’s Angels, Pitch Perfect 2) from a screenplay by Jimmy Warden (The Babysitter: Killer Queen), Cocaine Bear is produced by Oscar® winners Phil Lord and Chris Miller (Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse, The Mitchells vs. The Machines) and Aditya Sood (The Martian) for Lord Miller, by Elizabeth Banks and Max Handelman (Pitch Perfect franchise) for Brownstone Productions, and by Brian Duffield (Spontaneous). Robin Fisichella (Ma) will executive produce.
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In an isolated Oregon town, a middleschool teacher (Keri Russell) and her sheriff brother (Jesse Plemons) become embroiled with her enigmatic student (Jeremy T. Thomas) whose dark secrets lead to terrifying encounters with a legendary ancestral creature who came before them.

Based on the short story The Quiet Boy by Nick Antosca, Antlers will be in Australian cinemas later in the year.

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It pulls out all the stops in its effort to entertain and to bring the overriding story arc to a popular conclusion, this includes surprise cameos and events that have been on the cards for quite a while now. It provides almost too much information upon first view and will certainly divide the uber fan as few franchises have such vested followers.

Even with a long running time of 141 minutes, there is little down time. The action is relentless as these characters have had ample time spent on their backstory before reaching episode nine. There are however a number of big reveals that will have fans who see the film feeling more in the club than ever. One thing that still rankles though is the disregard for the laws of physics, they are laws folks, not mere suggestions

Having grown up with Star Wars but never focusing on the minute details as some super fans have, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker provided a more than satisfactory end to a series of works that started strong, had a wobbly middle and ended on a high note. It will be at the heart of many a film discussion for years to come and rightfully so.

Rob Hudson
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The film stars Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, Adam Driver, Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Anthony Daniels, Naomi Ackie, Domhnall Gleeson, Richard E. Grant, Lupita Nyong’o, Keri Russell, Joonas Suotamo, Kelly Marie Tran, and Billy Dee Williams.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is directed by J.J. Abrams and produced by Kathleen Kennedy, Abrams and Michelle Rejwan. Callum Greene, Tommy Gormley and Jason McGatlin serve as executive producers. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker was written by J.J. Abrams & Chris Terrio.
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From THE HUNGER GAMES writer and director Gary Ross, and starring Academy Award® winner Matthew McConaughey, comes an epic wartime action romance about one man’s defiance which led to a revolution on and off the battlefield. Pokemon Go

FREE STATE OF JONES is based on the thrilling and moving true story of Newton Knight (McConaughey), a soldier who, in a time of conflict that divided a nation, flees the battlefields after being disillusioned by the horrors of war that touched his own family.

On the run, he rallies the support of fellow deserters to lead an uprising against their former comrades, in the process creating a free safe haven and embarking on a forbidden love that would ultimately stand the test of time.
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Competition will be drawn 17 August 2016, winners will be notified by mail.

The plague created by Will Rodman’s Alzheimer’s ‘cure’ has spread throughout the globe and decimated the human population and, presumably, empowered ape populations worldwide. Caesar’s simian refugees build a growing community in the redwood forest while a splinter group of human survivors eke out an existence within the ruins of San Francisco. The diminishing fuel supply the human’s require for electricity generation inevitably bring them into contact with Caesar’s community who presides over a derelict hydroelectric facility.

This loose remake of Battle for the Planet of the Apes (the final film in the original franchise) betters its already excellent predecessor in most respects with more frequent action, intriguing plot and admirably balanced political themes. It’s a grown up film which accepts the complicated reality that good guys and bad guys are not divided along social, racial or indeed special lines; that, despite the best intentions of our heroes for peace, there is an inevitability of conflict in the world and an, albeit reluctant, place for violence within it.

We all know this, of course, but in movie land we like to believe that all issues are in simple black and white. At least that’s what the money men behind the movies tend to think. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is here to show us that audiences are indeed capable of, and will happily digest, complicated real world issues as forms of high end entertainment and that it can be done to a high degree of quality.

Quality films require quality performances and the key roles deliver here. It’s nice to see Jason Clarke in a hero role and be effective in it. Andy Serkis is, as always, amazing with the physicality of his performance as Caesar and, as usual, you would never know it was him were his name not in the credits. Gary Oldman is sleep walking through this but even a slumberous Oldman is rarely worth complaining about. No mention of the performances would be complete without commenting on the apes in the film which are amazingly realistic. Whether they be real, make-up or CGI (likely a mixture of all three, I suspect), the effect is phenomenally convincing.

The film does fall down a tad in its overblown climactic battle which is incommensurate with the intelligent plotting and action within the film thus far. But despite this tendency towards Transformers in the final act, the film remains, on the whole, a highly entertaining blockbuster with an intelligent social commentary.

Stuart Jamieson
www.dawnoftheplanetoftheapes.com.au