Tag Archives: Jacqueline McKenzie

Force of Nature: The Dry 2 – Movie Review

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TL;DR – There is a solid film in here; you just need to find it through all the messiness.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5.

Post-Credit Scene – There is no post-credit scene.

Disclosure – I paid to watch this film.

The Victorian bush.

Force of Nature: The Dry 2 Review –

Back in 2020, there was a great moment when, thanks to the current circumstances, The Dry, Penguin Bloom, and High Ground were the top films in Australia, the first time in an age that three Australian films had managed that. Of those, there was one that was primed for a sequel, and that is what we are looking at today.

So to set the scene, it is a wet and cold morning as four women crash through the bush of the Giralang Ranges to the sound of a coming car. Jill Bailey (Deborra-Lee Furness), Beth (Sisi Stringer), Bree (Lucy Ansell) & Lauren (Robin McLeavy) are cold, wet, and hurt, but all the more importantly, they are missing one of their group, Alice (Anna Torv). It is a dense forest, and searching it will be difficult, but as we discover, Alice is an informant, and her last phone call to Aaron Falk (Eric Bana) was profoundly concerning, making people wonder just what happened up on that mountain.    

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Poker Face – Movie Review

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TL;DR – There could have been a good film here, but it gets lost in the mess of two competing ideas.     

Rating: 2.5 out of 5.

Post-Credit Scene – There is no post-credit scene

Disclosure – I paid for the Stan service that viewed this film

rolling waves

Poker Face Review –

One of the things about reviewing films that can be frustrating is when you get a movie where you can see promise in there, but the final product just falls flat. You feel for the filmmakers because they were so close to finding something unique, but you must review what you get at the end of the day. Well, on that front, let’s look at Poker Face.

So to set the scene, we open in on a bunch of kids playing cards, jumping off cliffs, running from bullies, and being there for each other. Many years later, the leader of the group, Jake (Russell Crowe), is visiting a local shaman (Jack Thompson) in the bush and asking his lawyer Sam McIntyre (Daniel MacPherson), to arrange some trust accounts and an extraordinary evening. Soon Michael Nankervis (Liam Hemsworth), Alex Harris (Aden Young), and Paul Muccino (Steve Bastoni) are all racing up the coast in sports cars to make it to Jake’s luxury oceanside holiday house. The childhood friends will play a high-stakes poker game, but secrets are about to escape.

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Movie Review – Occupation

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TL;DR – Occupation is an Aussie take on the Alien Invasion genre, with a fantastic setup and ending, though it does meander a bit in the middle.

Score – 3.5 out of 5 stars

Post-Credit Scene – There is no post-credit scene

Occupation. Image Credit: Pinnacle Films/Sparkefilms

Review –

For those who have read my work before you would likely know that I am a big fan of the Science Fiction genre, and one of the types of media that falls under that banner is Alien Invasions. They can be on the small scale like Predator, or on the large scale like Independence Day and X-Com, or that one time with Battleship where it was weirdly mid-scale, that was an odd film. However, the basic premise of all these films is that one day everything is normal, you are going about your day without a care in the world and then everything changes. I really enjoy the Alien Invasion sub-genre, indeed I count Independence Day as one of my favourite films of all time, however, a lot of the recent films have been well disappointing, sorry Independence Day Resurgence (see review). Well, today I take a look at a film that is taking the genre in the right direction with an Aussie twist.

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