Articles by Luke Buckmaster

The Beaver is a quietly unsettling inspirational story.

British funnymen Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon coast between hotels, restaurants and quaint countryside locations in director Michael Winterbottom’s Sideways-esque love letter to good food, wine and conversation.

After seven films, 11 years, four directors and a cumulative running time that lasts longer than a Jewish wedding, the story of the world’s most famous magic-channelling do-gooder finally comes to a close in a fireball of cheese and spectacle in The Deathly Hallows: Part Two.

The idea of watching Robert Duvall hiss and sputter as a bitter old hermit and Bill Murray attempt to appease him as a smarmy money-hungry undertaker is like catnip for any semi-cultured cinephile, more than enough reason to hand over your hard earned and settle in with the company of two grizzled stalwarts who are […]

Director Carlo Ledesma’s subterranean spook-fest The Tunnel is an underground film in a literal sense — it is largely based in dilapidated tunnels and bunkers below metropolitan Sydney — and an above the ground film in a sense the local industry has never seen before.

Snowtown isn’t just a brilliant piece of blood-curdling cinema, says Luke Buckmaster, or just one of the best local features of this or any year. It’s the most frightening Aussie flick ever made.

If Alfred Hitchcock were alive and directed a cross between The Matrix, Groundhog Day and Murder on the Orient Express it would resemble something along the lines of Source Code, says Luke Buckmaster.

The sad, sweet, enormously moving biopic of TV producer Barney Panofsky, Barney’s Version, features front and centre a career-best performance from Paul Giamatti.

You’ll never guess where this rollicking druggy sci-fi drama will go, and these days unpredictable stories from Hollywood are rare finds, the cinematic four leaf clover.

The Reef is a tense creature feature from Andrew Traucki.

Ah, Bobby and Peter Farrelly. Those giants of gross out. Those titans of the toilet bowl. Those pharaohs of the fart joke. Nothing’s changed in Hall Pass. Just as well, says Luke Buckmaster.

Cheesy fist in the air moments and blatant grabs for emotional gravity always threatened to derail the twitchy pleasure of watching Unstoppable, but Scott keeps the cheese low fat and the action thick and flowing.

Writer/director Sofia Coppola’s slow-moving slice-of-life drama Somewhere follows the day-to-day routine of a Hollywood star as he drifts between hotels, press junkets, floozy women and juggles the duties of being a father. Stephen Dorff plays Johnny Marco, a big-name Hollywood actor forever whisked between photo ops, publicists and gushing fans. The focus is very much […]

Set during the 1982 Lebanon War and based entirely inside a tank, Israeli filmmaker Samuel Moaz’s Lebanon is the second single-setting war movie released in 2010.

Devil is about five people trapped in an elevator. One of them is the devil. The story for the most part sidesteps expectations, ducking and weaving and messing with the viewer’s mind, making for a thrilling that moves — and not just up and down.

Like Machete, Red Hill captures a non-Caucasian gut-busting anti-hero who unleashes a biblical-esque plague of vengeance onto those who crossed him.

Exploitation movies don’t get much more deliriously exploitative than pulpy auteur Robert Rodriguez’s high-octane tribute to grindhouse cinema.

Documentary maker Josh Fox knew he was onto something big when he watched one of his neighbours turn on the kitchen tap and set the water that came out of it on fire.