Hugh Jackman embraces brutality in The Death of Robin Hood

Welcome to the ABC Arts June film wrap.

This month sees Australian director Adrian Chiarella make his mark in the stellar run of local horror releases with Leviticus.

Plus Hugh Jackman embraces brutality in The Death of Robin Hood, zombies carry a warning about AI in Colony, and Toy Story 5 takes on the tech generation.

Happy watching!

The Christophers

A roguish Sir Ian McKellen spitting acerbic put-downs is the stuff of dreams. So it is with The Christophers, the latest from astonishingly prolific director Steven Soderbergh. The Black Bag helmer casts everyone's favourite Gandalf as Julian Sklar, a hermit-like artist of notorious renown, thanks to a relentlessly mean stint crushing creative kids' dreams on a TV show called Art Fight.

Holed up grumbling in his crumbling Bloomsbury mansion, Julian has abandoned painting, including the series of portraits of the past lover that lends his name to the film. Instead, Julian pays the bills by recording arch personal messages for his love-to-hate-him fans.

It's into this lion-in-winter's den that Mother Mary co-lead Michaela Cole's Lori Butler reluctantly steps, after enduring Julian's merciless sport of buzzing open whichever of two doors she's not waiting in front of.

A once-promising artist herself, Lori now runs a food truck but has an occasional side gig in forgery. A service requested by Julian's estranged and grasping children, Sallie and Barnaby (Jessica Gunning and James Corden), they task Lori with posing as Julian's new assistant so she can secretly swipe the unfinished Christophers, completing them to inordinately boost their impending inheritance.

Essentially a two-hander with a zinging screenplay by Bill & Ted scribe Ed Solomon, Soderbergh's actors' paradise perfectly pairs Cole and McKellen. Julian's every utterance is deliciously wicked, feeling rolled off his rancorous cuff. Cole, in the quieter role, layers astonishing depth into Lori's wounded soul.

Refusing to paint by numbers, The Christophers is a mercurially marvellous masterpiece.

Stephen A Russell

Colony

Colony, the latest film from prolific genre filmmaker Yeon Sang-ho (Train to Busan), is a nasty little delight.

Fast-tracked straight from Cannes's Midnight Screenings, this locked-down zombie thriller starts off strong and little time is wasted before an aggrieved scientist (Koo Kyo-hwan) unleashes a mycelia bioweapon on the ground floor of a bustling skyscraper.

The survivors trapped inside are shockingly competent. Protagonists (and former spouses) Se Jeong (Jun Ji-hyun, My Sassy Girl) and Han Gyu Seong (Go Soo) are in town for a biotech conference, and quickly deduce the virus isn't exactly rotting its victims' brains so much as it's rewiring them to a shared frequency: a "cognitive revolution" orchestrated by its creator. In a novel twist, the infected are treated not as monsters to be guiltlessly ploughed through, but patients awaiting treatment.

Some Romero-esque commentary rears its head in the building's shopping mall as the zombies mistake screen advertisements for humans. But the hive-mind evolves with frightening speed, setting off a strategic game where the heroes attempt to sabotage this organic information network with false data. Visceral, low-angled camera work effortlessly keeps pace with the fast-moving foes.

The film never quite meets the promise of its first act, and disappointingly turns back on its new ideas as it barrels towards its ruthless finale. Nonetheless, Colony distinguishes itself within this year's impressive horror slate with its breathless, grisly excitement.

Jamie Tram

The Death of Robin Hood

If you missed the posters declaring "HE WAS NO HERO", The Death of Robin Hood is quick to catch you up — Hugh Jackman's Robin denies the stories, commits a gruesome murder and buries the victim in a sea of graves before the title card.

Rather than redistributing wealth, Michael Sarnoski's take on Robin Hood is a murderous brute who told stories to justify his crimes and is now looking for a glorious death. Hunted by the families of those he's killed, Robin ends up badly injured and in the care of the mysterious Sister Brigid (Jodie Comer), who forces him to reckon with the cyclical nature of revenge.

Stunningly shot and visually arresting, The Death of Robin Hood suffers from its own premise: stripping Robin Hood back to a murderous brute makes the character deeply unsympathetic. Jackman channels both Wolverine and Jean Valjean but comes up short in comparison to both.

Once the story settles into a more thoughtful, gentle mode it hits its stride, but with its uneven tone and a pace that both rushes and drags, it's hard to know who The Death of Robin Hood is for. The brutality of the film's first act is what allows it to meditate on the nature of violence for the rest of its runtime, but it's hard to see a meditative audience sitting through the fight where Robin peels a hand (whatever you're imagining that means, it's worse).

Tansy Gardam

Leviticus

Talk to Me, Birdeater, Late Night with the Devil, Leviticus: Adrian Chiarella's debut feature follows a recent trend of incredible indie horror made by incredible Australian talent.

What sets it apart from the majority of those before it is its central thesis: what if queer desire was challenged by a demonic manifestation of religious homophobia?

Set in a small country town, Leviticus follows the teenaged Niam (Joe Bird) and his born-again Pentecostal mother Arlene (Mia Wasikowska). Feeling smothered by the happy clapper's backwards beliefs, he finds an unexpected comfort in Ryan (Stacy Clausen), a fellow closeted teen who is eager to explore his sexuality.

The two start a hidden romance — but are discovered and forced to undergo a strange conversion ritual performed by a faith healer. The results are, by design, heartbreaking and haunting.

What resonates most is the fact that this fictional town's beliefs aren't really that fringe. Queer people have long been othered by society; turned into monsters in the minds of the heteronormative status quo. It's still happening, building in some places to an unprecedented scale. Leviticus explores what happens when that hatred is internalised; using and subverting the tropes of its genre to keep us guessing. It's incredibly original and moving, with star-making performances from both Bird and Clausen. See it as soon as possible.

Silvi Vann-Wall

Masters of the Universe

Before 2023, most people would have thought a movie based on a (very gendered) children's doll was box-office poison.

But then Greta Gerwig's Barbie turned out to be both a critical and box office success, and Mattel naturally began to look for their next hit. Where better to go next than with He-Man, the excessively toned hero whose name literally means "male-male"? A pity, then, that Masters of the Universe is just no fun.

Like Gerwig before him, Travis Knight is not the first director to put this beloved action figure to screen. Born from the popular animated series, 1987's Masters of the Universe was the first live-action He-Man film, with Dolph Lundgren in the loincloth and sandals.

Knight's new version is essentially a modern reboot, substituting Lundgren with the slightly-less-buff but more charismatic Nicholas Galitzine — who does a fine job contrasting the ordinary Adam with the extraordinary He-Man. These levels of pure himbo energy have not been seen since Brendan Fraser in 1997's George of the Jungle.

It's colourful, it's full of action, and it's got a pretty sweet 80s-inspired soundtrack (with guitar provided by legendary Brian May). It even has a reference to one of the best internet memes of all time.

Alas: these are but a few of the film's redeeming qualities. In a world already over-saturated with superheroes and space adventures, Masters of the Universe simply doesn't do enough to stand out. At best, it's a fine and inoffensive family outing. At worst, it's an overblown slide-show (two-and-a-half hours long!) of boyhood dreams lost to time — and far too much Jared Leto (which, let's be honest, is any amount of Jared Leto).

Silvi Vann-Wall

Toy Story 5

The problem with Pixar nowadays isn't really that they've cashed in on pointless sequels; after all, Toy Story 2 is still one of the most effortlessly entertaining films the studio has produced, while countless original efforts (from Elio to Elemental) have floundered.

Toy Story 5 is as cheerfully competent and forgettable as the rest of its recent line-up, benefiting greatly from our pre-existing fondness for its characters — but nonetheless represents a grim milestone for a company once famed for its ingenuity.

This time around, it's Jessie (Joan Cusack) who takes the reins when the toys' latest owner, Bonnie (Scarlett Spears) begins replacing play time with screen time in the form of a 'Lilypad' tablet (voiced by Past Lives' Greta Lee).

Returning director Andrew Stanton mourns the generation of iPad babies and the death of creative play; the most effective scenes hinge upon Bonnie's struggle to find space in her friends' online world. (It is odd, however, that Toy Story has begun to encroach on Inside Out territory.)

Yet the timely setup is mostly an excuse for Jessie to revisit the home of her first child and come to grips with her abandonment issues.

The film's emotional throughline is overly reliant on reminding us how much we bawled our eyes at Toy Story 2. It's cheap — that one Sarah McLachlan song is recalled several times — but you'll still probably cry.

Jamie Tram

Tuner

Hyperacusis is a hearing disorder characterised by a chronic sensitivity to noise and sounds.

It's a condition that afflicts (or arms, depending on which way you look at it) New Yorker Niki White (Leo Woodall), a piano tuner with perfect pitch who has developed a heightened sensitivity to sonic vibrations as a compensatory by-product of his condition.

Mentored by and in business with his elder family friend Harry Horowitz (Dustin Hoffman), things start to unravel for Niki when Horowitz falls ill and he finds himself in cahoots with a criminal syndicate who capitalise on his ability to break into safes.

Director Daniel Roher's feature film debut, co-written with Robert Ramsey, blends a crime caper, rom-com and family drama as it spins gold out of its superb characterisations and ratchets up in intensity as the film's stakes increase exponentially in its last third.

Perennially clad with protective earplugs and noise-cancelling headphones, Woodall proves his versatility in the understated role of Niki, as he balances a conflicted moral conscience with an outwardly impassive exterior. Havana Rose Liu is luminous as student composer Ruthie and Niki's love interest — the chemistry between her and Woodall is electric — while Dustin Hoffman shines in his scant appearances on-screen as a loving patriarch.

But what's perhaps most remarkable about Tuner is Max Behrens's (of The Zone of Interest fame) sound design, which mimics the minutiae of Niki's condition. Junctures of intense chaos and unexpected noise are amplified, while moments of extreme pain and discombobulation are shrouded in the blank space of unhearing.

Somewhat ironically, someone with Niki's condition would find Tuner almost unwatchable due to its uncannily visceral simulation of a loud, overwhelming world, but within Roher and Ramsey's thoughtfully created tale is a reverence of an age-old art form (piano tuning) and a deep love of those who both play and listen to music.

Sonia Nair