THE SONG KEEPERS (full review at The Reel Word)

The Song Keepers tells us the story of the Central Australian Aboriginal Women's Choir. 30-35 Central Australian women from remote communities, sing hymns originally taught to their grandparents by German missionaries, translated and composed in Indigenous languages. In 2015 they went on tour to Germany, bringing the hymns back to their point of origin, having taken on their own meaning and relevance to the communities they were brought to. Filmmaker Naina Sen documented the journey.

Read the full article at The Reel Word:
https://www.thereelword.net/the-song-keepers-documentary-review/

IMDB: The Song Keepers

PACIFIC RIM: UPRISING (full review at The Reel Word)

Guillermo Del Toro’s Pacific Rim landed on our screens back in 2013 and certainly had its fair share of detractors, as a brief trawl through the popular movie aggregators will attest. But while many laud Del Toro for his weightier works, some of us find his genre fare far more appealing. Sure, a melancholy tale of fish-man love will win you an Oscar, but does it have mind-melding robots punching the crap out of giant interdimensional monsters? And so with that, and a decent box office behind it, Pacific Rim: Uprising is here. With Stephen S. DeKnight (Daredevil) taking over the helm and Del Toro relegated to producing duties, can it live up to the lunkheaded majesty of the original?

Read the full article at The Reel Word:
https://www.thereelword.net/pacific-rim-uprising-movie-review-2018/

IMDB: Pacific Rim Uprising

THE ENDLESS (full review at The Reel Word)

The Endless is Justin Benson and Aaron Scott Moorhead’s follow up to 2014s unique body horror romance Spring. The Endless made its Australian debut at the 2017 Melbourne International Film Festival, ahead of a broader release this month.

Benson and Moorhead also take on the leading roles, as Justin and Aaron respectively, two brothers who have escaped from a UFO cult and spent ten years trying to adjust to life outside the compound. They work cleaning jobs, struggle to make friends and Aaron, being too young to remember negative experiences with the cult, is resentful of how tough they have it in ‘normal’ society. Aaron longs for the familiarity and comfort of their former home. So when a mysterious video tape arrives from the cult, Justin relents under pressure and agrees to visit for one day. Upon arrival, they are immediately welcomed at Camp Arcadia and reunited with old friends. The cult subsists on the profits from their popular homebrew, and having obviously not committed suicide, as Justin had claimed, the simple country life of the cult begins to look a lot more appealing to Aaron than their hand-to-mouth existence back home. However the longer the brothers stay at the compound, the more they start to notice strange and inexplicable events.

Read the full article at The Reel Word:
https://www.thereelword.net/the-endless-movie-review/

IMDB: The Endless

ANNIHILATION (full review at The Reel Word)

Lena (Natalie Portman) is a biologist and former soldier, who arrives at a research base in Area X following the reappearance of her husband Kane (Oscar Issaac), who had gone missing
on a classified military operation. As Kane slips into a coma, Lena agrees to join a team of other scientists on a journey into The Shimmer, an unknown area of alien origin which is rapidly expanding to cover everything surrounding it.
The team’s mission is to reach the centre of the anomaly to collect whatever data they can, and Lena is joined by Dr Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh), Anya (Gina Rodriguez), Cass (Tuva Novotny) and Josie (Tessa Thompson). As they travel further into The Shimmer they experience the strange effects of the alien zone, from memory loss to technology failure to the wild mutations of the plants and animals.

Read the full article at The Reel Word:
https://www.thereelword.net/annihilation-movie-review/

IMDB: Annihilation

THE RITUAL (full review at The Reel Word)

After a experiencing a tragedy, four friends Luke (Rafe Spall), Phil (Arsher Ali), Hutch (Robert James-Collier) and Dom (Sam Troughton) attempt to cope with their grief by embarking on a hike in Northern Sweden. When Dom injures his leg, and anxious to get back early to the hike lodge, the group elects to take a short cut through a forest. Upon entering the forest they are subjected to nightmares, strange events and a malevolent, unknown evil.

Read the full article at The Reel Word:
https://www.thereelword.net/the-ritual-movie-review-netflix/

IMDB: The Ritual

STAR TREK: DISCOVERY (full review at The Reel Word)

After an incident aboard the U.S.S. Shenzhou results in the United Federation of Planets entering into a war with the mysterious and vicious Klingon Empire, disgraced former First Officer, Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green), finds herself amongst the crew of the U.S.S. Discovery. The Discovery is a prototype ship, a one-of-a-kind, because it hosts an experimental spore drive (derived from fungus). Under the guidance of Chief Engineer Paul Stamets (Anthony Rapp) it allows Discovery to use an intricate mycelial network (similar to the roots of a plant) to transport itself, undetected, to almost anywhere in the universe. Instantaneously.

Beginning life on Discovery as a pariah, Burnham strives to regain the trust of her new crewmembers and former shipmates.  Under the command of Captain Gabriel Lorca (Jason Isaacs), and with the friendship of Cadet Sylvia Tilly (Mary Wiseman), Burnham begins her path to redemption, as the Federation battles for survival.

Read the full article at The Reel Word:
https://www.thereelword.net/star-trek-discovery-season-1-review-cbs-netflix/

IMDB: Star Trek: Discovery

ALTERED CARBON (full review at The Reel Word)

To try and concisely summarise the plot of Altered Carbon, Netflix’s latest big budget foray into your living room, would likely take as much space as the housebrick of a novel on which it is based. But the gist of it, adapting Richard K Morgan’s 2002 sci-fi opus into ten tasty increments, is thus…

In the distant future human beings are equipped with a device at the base of their skull known as a stack. Acting as a sort of hard-drive-for-the-soul, the stack stores a person’s life, memory, and identity, known as Digital Human Freight (DHF). If a person’s stack remains intact when they die then it is possible to place the stack in a new body, or sleeve, and for the person to carry on living with all the same memories, emotions and experiences. The technology, although available to all, is unsurprisingly controlled by the super-rich. This wealthiest one per cent, having cheated ‘real death’ for generations, are known as Meths, after the Bible’s oldest man Methuselah.

Read the full article at The Reel Word:
https://www.thereelword.net/altered-carbon-season-1-review-netflix/

IMDB: Altered Carbon